For Sama is an account of a woman's experiences during the siege of the Syrian city of Aleppo. A brutal component of the battle by Syria's president Assad and his Russian ally is the deliberate targeting of civilians and in particular schools and hospitals. This documentary details the story of a young woman, a college student who became involved in the protests against the Assad regime's repression of the Syrian people. She goes to work in a hospital in Aleppo and falls in love with a doctor. They marry and their daughter is born and named Sama. The mothers accumulates films she has documented before and after her daughters birth as a future testament to her. The couple and their child essentially live in the hospital with their friends and staff. The husband and the hospital staff treat casualties that would overwhelm the most modern Western facilities. It breaks your heart to see the deaths of so many innocent people and in particular the children who are mourned by the family members who accompanied them. The incessant bombing by the Syrian government and the Russians is a thing that they live with every day and has to be viewed as nothing less than war crimes. In the face of all this, they all try to maintain each other's spirits and bring together what small shreads of decency that still exists to replace the horror with a sense of the world that existed before the war. This to me was so touching and I was so proud to realize what these people were capable of. It reaffirmed the proof that humanity and dignity cannot be eradicated by despots and killers. Do not miss this, rarely is the triumph of the human condition displayed so passionately in the midst of unrelenting terror.
Review of For Sama
