For Sama (2019)

It's not often that I watch inherently tragic documentaries, no matter how honored they are. In this case, I accepted a Meetup invitation to see it in a theater. That meant more immersion, but at least I wouldn't feel alone in bearing it.

Made with a home movie camera and a few clips apparently from surveillance cameras, FS begins its story in 2011, when the then-18-year-old videographer, going by Waad Al-Kateab (her real name is not public information), attended the University of Aleppo. If that city name rings a bell, you should have a good idea what the focal conflict is. Waad's narration partly addresses her toddler daughter, Sama, to whom she wants to explain why their family didn't escape sooner and why they had a baby at all in a setting like that.

I won't swear this is the saddest doc I've ever seen, but it's certainly the least for the faint of heart. I'm surprised IMDb designates it TV-PG (it doesn't have an MPAA rating), given all the actual dead and badly wounded people we see, some before and after death. Waad's husband is a doctor, so she must have recorded more casualties than the average Aleppo citizen witnessed in person.

While I don't recall any injuries in progress, we are not spared further elements of violence. Early on, we see one set of filled but open body bags after a mass gunning by Syrian soldiers. Far more often, we see and/or hear bombings by Russian pilots, some close enough to cause immediate alarm to Waad and others in the vicinity. Were it not real, it would make for an effective found-footage horror flick.

For the most part, I related quite well to everyone on screen (in contrast to the bombers who specifically targeted hospitals -- how soulless can you get?). Differences in language, religion, and other cultural trappings seemed insignificant. The one exception was that they sometimes seemed to take the building destruction and carnage slightly less seriously than I thought appropriate. But then, when it happens more or less daily for months if not years, a trace of fatigue is bound to set in.

That arguably makes the crisis all the more disturbing. It's a terrible experience for anyone, but the little kids, who shouldn't even know about death yet, start to take the situation as normal. Waad especially regrets that Sama doesn't cry much.

Waad doesn't directly answer her own posed questions, but I think I understand. It's hard to leave a place where you've always lived and that wasn't always so bad. And Sama, just by virtue of infancy, represented a new hope for tomorrow, so everyone was pleased to meet her.

I hesitate to recommend anything so hard to watch, but given that the events happened, I'm very glad to have them so skillfully presented, and I don't regret spending the 96 minutes that way. What it lacks in fun, it makes up for in reification of foreign tragedy. Now I pretty much have to watch American Factory to find out why FS didn't win Best Documentary at the Oscars.