08 ISSUE I
DECEMBER 2024
DECEMBER 2024
Manuel Castells predicted this
The lasting legacy of the documentary “For Sama,” about the struggle for political freedom in Syria, is it shows how to live with the deepest hope and resilience in the worst possible circumstances.
By Emma Jehle
At one point in her 2019 documentary “For Sama,” journalist Waad al-Kateab says: “Targeting hospitals breaks people’s spirits.” She is narrating her family’s survival amid a war. Syria’s civil war in 2016, the same year she gave birth to her daughter Sama. Security footage shows four men crouched in shock amidst the rubble in a hospital where al-Kataeab’s husband Hamza – an activist and one of few remaining doctors in Aleppo – once worked. The city had just been blitzed. In the previous scene, a bloodied, unconscious woman is given an emergency c-section. We watch as a seemingly lifeless baby is pulled from her body, and doctors struggle to inspire a first breath. After vigorous back rubs and spanks, the infant is gently placed back onto a table. Framed tightly, his eyes open, and he releases a cry. “Yallah, yallah.” The medical workers allow themselves a moment of relief.
The film is a love letter to Sama, and even the preamble to an apology for why she and her husband decided to stay in the city and fight during what has become a deep, ongoing humanitarian crisis that has killed more than 500,000 people – including more than 164,000 civilians – and displaced millions.
The great strength of “For Sama” is that it shows the force of the will to live, to be free, amidst the callousness and cruelty of the Syrian government’s campaign to maintain power. At the time al-Kateab was filming, President Bashar al-Assad’s government was conducting violence against its population with support from Russia. Aleppo was nearing capture by government forces.
“I don’t want to die. I want to live; I want to give birth. I want Hamza to be with me,” says a pregnant al-Kateab. “Sama, you are the most beautiful thing in our lives.” She also feels guilty. “But what a life I’ve brought you into. You did not choose this. Will you ever forgive me?” Accountability is among the film's themes.
The current conflict in Syria began after citizen uprisings in 2011 were met by violent government repression. The insurgency that followed morphed into a global proxy war with involvement from radical Islamist groups, Russia, Iran, and a U.S-led Western coalition. It has also had other international ramifications, including mass displacement that has strained surrounding countries and Western Europe. It is the sort of global issue that illustrates what Spanish social theorist Manuel Castells calls “the growing gap between the space where the issues arise (global) and the space where the issues are managed (the nation-state).”
As a journalist covering the war from Aleppo, al-Kateab filed many stories about what was happening on the ground for Britain’s Channel 4 News. One such report is included in her documentary: that of the seemingly lifeless baby pulled from his mother after an airstrike in 2016. The film, however, makes it clear that such harrowing reports had little effect on the Syrian government, illustrating the crisis of legitimacy that the regime was already facing and violently attempting to quash. “Millions of people watch my videos, but no one does anything to stop the regime,” al-Kateab narrates as Hamza takes a video call from an unnamed news outlet in one scene.
Al-Kateab’s reports on Channel 4 are available online for people in and outside Syria. Still, her documentary perhaps approximates a call to the global public sphere as envisioned by Castells. The arena of messages and debates on digital, interconnected, global media networks that can influence “a new form of consensual global governance.”
This is undoubtedly the dream many had for the internet by the late 2000s when Castells’ ideas about a global public sphere first became widely available. That decade and the 2010s were marked by viral videos and digital campaigns that sought to garner attention and inspire political action globally on many social justice and political issues. For example, global petition websites like Avaaz and Change.org amplified many such campaigns and other issues first brought to our attention by viral videos documenting atrocities on the ground like that made by al-Kateab.
“For Sama” raises global awareness about Syria and may have inspired people to act. It has been lauded in mainstream media; it has won many film prizes since its first release, including The Golden Eye for best documentary at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival. It certainly has impacted those worldwide who have watched it – a process that modern communication networks have facilitated. In the US, streaming is free on the public network PBS.org’s Frontline site where you can access a library of documentary films. What’s less certain is whether the gap between global crises and global co-decision-making on solutions is beginning to close, whether that new form of consensual global governance, informed and shaped by the values that emerge out of the global public sphere – values like no more war, like the inherent sanctity of every human life, like a line that should never be crossed – is emerging and whether films like “For Sama” has any influence on changing global public opinion.
I watched this film on the first anniversary of Hamas’s October 7th, 2023, attack on Israel and Israel’s decision since then to launch a total siege on Gaza. It was difficult to watch this documentary, given that events similar to those shown in the film have been happening over the past year to the Palestinian people and have now been expanded by Israel’s military into Lebanon, Yemen, and even Syria. Hospitals, universities, neighborhoods, and whole families have been destroyed. The film’s lasting strength, five years after it was first released, is that it serves as a testament to how to live with the deepest hope and resilience in the worst possible circumstances. “I would do it all again, even if I never recover from the trauma. I regret nothing,” Waad tells baby Sama as the film ends.
Emma Jehle is completing an MA in International Affairs at The New School.