Waal Al-Kateab’s For Sama provides an incredibly close and personal look at a few lives enveloped by the responsibility to care for their besieged city and neighbours, in Aleppo. Even with a simple mention of the city’s name one can recall countless harrowing images of disfigurement, death and destruction which are often coupled with a relative lack of a bigger picture regarding the why. For Sama doesn’t provide an answer for these questions but instead provides a singular extended viewpoint through which one cannot turn a blind eye to the atrocities of the Syrian war. This is largely due to the fact that every image is delivered from within the community who are enduring the struggle—in other words we see the human tragedy relatively isolated from its larger contexts, we aren’t given someone to blame or point fingers towards we are simply given images of people struggling to keep their ideal alive.
As such, the film allows a viewer a step into a tightly knit community which, through a deep sense of responsibility, continues to struggle in the hope of victory in the face of adversity.
But where are we, the viewers, in this equation? The question of why we are being shown is somewhat clear—the documents are hugely important to recognise war at a human, rather than national, scale—however on another level it is less clear—how should we mobilise all the emotion the film conjures up within us? The clear options of donating money, time or manpower rush to mind, however when watching the film one device, the music, suggested that this may not be the aim whatsoever.
For Sama’s score is strategically scattered around the film, comprising of beautifully composed melodies containing sorrow and pain within each note. But as I was watching images, recorded live on Al-Kateab’s camera, which contained such extreme personal and communal pain and distress the downcast score became discordant. It ran it’s course as if it were needed to place emotion into the images and viewers, similar to the common function of scoring in fictional cinema where such synthetic emotion somehow brings us closer to truth in the wholly fabricated reality. Yet these images needed no assistance to display their power. They contained raw power. As such I would feel myself roll my eyes, becoming agitated as the audio-visual space insisted I shifted my mode of viewing from an intensely emotional reaction to reality, to an emotional reaction due to manipulation. Resultantly, the cinema filled with sniffles and tears as the audience wept, but what exactly were we weeping at? The images, the pain and the suffering of these people as people, or were we crying at their suffering as an emotional spectacle?
This thought became all the more apparent as the film ended and the lights came back up. The first few comments I heard from the audience behind me were personal ones—“I can’t bear it”, “I had recently seen so-and-so film and coupled with this it’s all too much”, “That really took it out of me” or, as put by my father somewhat comedically, but obviously bearing some semblance of truth, “there goes my Monday-morning positivity”. And that’s when it struck me, the score I had been struggling with had shifted the entire mode of viewing. It became less a concern with the issues on screen and more a cathartic, if exhausting, way for the audience to open the flood gates for all their emotion kept down in day-to-day living.
As these s(t)imulated emotions are directly related to entertainment cinema (akin, but not wholly equivalent to, to main-cannon fiction), the audience begins to adjust as such, viewing For Sama as a spectacle instead of a real problem which is effecting real people. But For Sama is not a film which sold itself, before or during, as entertainment for the better-off masses, so why do these elements exist?
As the credits begin to roll we see a somewhat surprising element. Besides Waad Al-Kateab’s name we see another, Edward Watts, credited as a director. A Brit who had seemingly teamed up with Al-Kateab after her escape from Aleppo, forming a partnership based solely on filmmaking and exhibition of the ideas within Al-Kateab’s footage. An interestingly illuminating interview with both of the directors (found here: https://cineuropa.org/en/video/372687/) seems to surface many of the concerns a partnership like this can form. Watts tellingly frames the entire film as
“a classical story…this story has a relevance to anyone wherever you are whatever your particular battle is, it could be with your boss at work”.
They further reveal that partway through editing they reframed the story around Sama, Al-Kateab’s daughter, in order to be more “engaging” and applicable to a cinema space. But these re-framings of incredibly raw and important footage to fit within the confines of the ‘cinema’, which Watts implies is an emotive, entertainment space, end up stripping back the effectiveness of the incredible footage. A testament to this is my own response—as I left the cinema I was incredibly moved but now, two days on, I feel little to nothing in relation to the film. The images of devastation in Syria persist, but feel wholly separate from what I experienced in the cinema. Through Watts and Al-Kateab’s reframing of reality to suit an audience, telegraphed so blatantly by the misused score, the specificity of the problem was lost. The film was no longer about Syria, nor about the crisis in Aleppo. These elements were stripped from the raw footage and replaced with a “classical story” which relates to everyone, stimulating tears to pour from our eyes, not for the Syrians being dismembered, starving and dying, but, for ourselves. Cultivating an emotion of spectacle rather than allowing the harrowing raw footage to display its fundamental and more complex power.
Watts ends the interview striving towards the thing the raw footage holds. He hopes the film will incite an “international will” to help Syria through an understanding of our “shared humanity”. Unfortunately I doubt this will be the case. After, ultimately, entertaining an audience for 1h30, and taking us on a relatively traditional ride from hope, to despair, to hope, to despair and relieving us with an end of relative joy—despite the fact everyone was still forced from the city after fighting to remain—the audience is satiated. To reinstate the words I heard upon leaving the cinema “that really took it out of me”, took out the desire to step closer to the issue, to help and strive to deliver these people what they were fighting for. Instead the audience leaves broken, having given up all their emotion at the feet of an issue—but not their true emotion. Instead the emotion squeezed into their minds strategically in the edit, conditioned and influenced by more classical cinematic fiction.
As such we see the fine line being miss-stepped. The score, clearly intended to bring out the raw emotion of the moment in fact changed the audience’s mode of viewing. Turning reality into a spectacle to let loose our inhibited emotions, and forget that this problem is specific and far greater than our feelings.
But here there are also questions of function. Perhaps Watts shifted For Sama to become more conventional narrative with standardised emotional arcs to receive a wider audience, as is being seen now with its wide release throughout London. But in my eyes this is a null point. Why inform more people if you are misinforming?
~Leo
For Sama (2019)
3-3-1
7/13