Waad al-Kateab filmed the siege of Aleppo from inside a hospital and addresses the result to her infant daughter. It is the most direct account of that war we have seen, and one of the hardest to sit through. Sit through it.
Waad al-Kateab was a student in Aleppo when the demonstrations against the regime began in 2012, and she picked up a camera. She kept it running for years: through the protests, through her marriage to Hamza Al-Khateab, a doctor who ran a hospital in the eastern half of the city, and through the birth of their daughter, Sama Al-Khateab, while the bombs were falling. For Sama is cut from that footage and spoken over as a letter to the child, an attempt to explain why her parents stayed. It runs 100 minutes, it is certificate 18, and we think everyone who can bear it should see it. We also understand why some people cannot.
She is credited as her own cinematographer, which is a grand phrase for what she was doing. The camera is small and handheld, it hunts for focus, and more than once it is put down on a counter in the middle of a crisis and left to record whatever passes. That is the film’s strength. A crew would have lit the hospital and found the angle; al-Kateab is in the corridor because she lives there, and the shots have the offhand framing of someone who is also trying to keep out of the way. When a strike lands near the building the picture jerks to the ceiling and comes back, and nobody has to explain what happened.
Edward Watts, who co-directs, and the editors Chloe Lambourne and Simon McMahon have not cut it in order. The film opens in the hospital in 2016 and then drops back to the university, forward to the birth, back to the wedding, and for the first twenty minutes or so we were checking the captions and doing sums. That is our one real complaint about the structure, and it does not last. Once the pattern settles, the earlier footage (a wedding, a new flat being painted, a garden with a tree in it) is weighted by what you already know is coming, and the editors use that weight carefully rather than for shock.
We were horrified, and we should say by what. Not the explosions, which the film shows plainly and without dwelling, but the hospital floor afterwards: children carried in grey with dust, a mother who has just been told and will not put her son down, and the staff moving around her because there is a next one. There is a birth, in the middle of the film, under bombardment, that we will not describe. It is the point at which we stopped writing anything down. She films it at eye level and holds the shot longer than a news camera would.
The letter itself is spoken quietly and without rhetoric. Waad al-Kateab asks Sama, more than once, whether she will understand and whether she will forgive them, and she does not pretend to know the answer. Hamza Al-Khateab is the film’s other centre, a calm man in a place with no reason for calm, seen mostly at work and occasionally asleep in his clothes. Nainita Desai’s score is restrained for most of the running time, a low pulse under the voiceover, and we were grateful for that. There are two or three passages where it swells under footage that needed no help, and we noticed each of them.
The ending reaches, a little, for a shape the footage never needed, and one or two of the later sequences are held past the point where they have done their work. These are small things. What the film gets right is the ordinary: Sama in a pushchair on a ruined street, a joke made over dinner about the shelling, children painting a burnt-out bus. Most films about this war were shot by people who flew in and flew out. This one was shot by a woman whose kitchen is in the frame.
Watch it in a cinema if one is showing it; the noise is part of it, and you cannot pause. At home, keep the lights on and have someone to talk to afterwards. It is an 18 and that is the right certificate.
