--- name: "Waad al-Kateab" canonical: "https://film.one/person/waad-al-kateab" roles: ["Actor","Cinematographer","Director","Producer"] born: "1 January 1991" reviewed_on_fi1m: 1 updated: "2026-09-17T05:35:21.364568+00:00" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Waad al-Kateab Actor and cinematographer. Born 1 January 1991 in Syria. ## Details - **Work:** Actor, Cinematographer, Director, Producer - **Born:** 1 January 1991, Syria - **Also known as:** Waad al-Khateab, وعد الخطيب, Waad al-Khatib - **Elsewhere:** https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q73235897, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm10408302/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/2220265 ## Fi1m on Waad al-Kateab > Waad al-Kateab spent five years filming the siege of Aleppo from inside her life and cut it into a letter to her daughter. It is the most direct account of that war we have seen. What she does without that archive is the open question. The camera in *For Sama* (2019) is put down on a counter in the middle of a crisis and left running. That is what happens when the person holding it is also needed. Waad al-Kateab is credited as her own cinematographer, and the phrase flatters the equipment: a small handheld camera that hunts for focus and jerks to the ceiling when a strike lands near the building. She shot the hospital corridor because she lived in it, and her framing is that of someone trying to keep out of the way. We have watched a great deal of war footage. Almost none of it was shot by someone who slept in the building. "I started filming the protests at Aleppo University with my phone," she has said, and she kept going for five years while studying marketing, filing television news reports and building up hundreds of hours of material. In that time she married Hamza Al-Khateab, a doctor who ran a hospital in the eastern half of the city, and gave birth to their daughter Sama while the bombs were falling. After leaving for the UK she cut the archive, with co-director Edward Watts, into 100 minutes addressed to the child, an attempt to explain why her parents stayed. Two more features have followed, *We Dare to Dream* (2023), about athletes on the Olympic Refugee Team, and *Death Without Mercy* (2024). We have reviewed neither. What makes *For Sama* work is that al-Kateab does not perform. The letter is spoken quietly and without rhetoric; she asks Sama more than once whether she will understand and whether she will forgive them, and she does not pretend to know. Hamza is a calm man in a place with no reason for calm, seen mostly at work. The shot that undid us was not a bombing. It was Hamza asleep in his clothes, because by then the film had made plain how long it had been since he had time to take them off. Edward Watts is credited as co-director, and the years have a shape the raw footage cannot have had on its own. Nainita Desai's score stays a low pulse under the voiceover for most of the running time, and we were grateful; two or three times it swells under footage that needed no help, and we noticed each one. The doubt about her is the one that follows anyone whose first film was their own life. Nobody else had those five years. For *We Dare to Dream* she had to go and find her subjects, and we do not yet know whether the eye that put the camera down on the counter works as well when it is pointed at strangers. Start with *For Sama*, in one sitting, and not late at night. It is certificate 18 and it earns it. ## Biography Waad al-Kateab is a Syrian journalist, filmmaker and activist. She moved to Aleppo in 2009 to study marketing at the University of Aleppo. When the Syrian Civil War began in 2011 she began filming as a citizen journalist, with her reports broadcast on Channel 4 News. Her documentary *For Sama* (2019), co-directed with Edward Watts, draws on five years of footage from Aleppo documenting her life, marriage to doctor Hamza al-Kateab and the birth of their daughter Sama. The film won the BAFTA for Best Documentary and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature. Her coverage of the Siege of Aleppo earned an International Emmy Award. *Sources: en.wikipedia.org, actionforsama.com.* ## On Fi1m (1) - *For Sama* (2019), Fi1m 88, as Self — [page](https://film.one/film/for-sama.md) --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/waad-al-kateab