For Sama – see my posts here and here – is now available on YouTube:
Sama is the daughter of the film-maker Waad al-Kateab and her husband Hamza, a hospital doctor and one of 32 who remained in East Aleppo.
For Sama was shot in East Aleppo; it begins in the early days of the rising against the Assad regime and focuses on life in and around two hospitals during the siege.
‘Sama’, we are told,
‘means the sky…. the sky we love, the sky we want… without airforces, without bombing… the sky with sun, with clouds, with birds…’
After their original hospital was destroyed in an airstrike – one of the doctors killed was Muhammad Waseem Maaz, who had delivered Sama (see also here and the slides for Death of the Clinic under the TEACHING tab) – they were able to move to a building ‘designed to be a hospital’ but never used and ‘not on any maps so the Russians and the regime wouldn’t know where to bomb…’
It would be the last hospital left functioning in East Aleppo, treating almost 300 patients a day.
‘Even when I close my eyes I see the colour red. Blood everywhere. On walls, floors, our clothes. Sometimes we cry blood.’