We speak with Waad al-Kateab and Edward Watts, the Oscar-nominated directors of For Sama, our highest-rated documentary of 2019.
“I think I crossed a lot of lines. One of the important reasons I had no limitations was because while I was filming, I never expected to stay alive.” —Waad al-Kateab
In an awards season where the Academy Awards’ Best Director nominees are all male, it’s in the Documentary Feature category that you’ll find the women, on four out of the five nominated films: Julia Reichert (a director of American Factory), Petra Costa (director of The Edge of Democracy), Tamara Kotevska (co-director of Honeyland), and Waad al-Kateab, one half of For Sama’s directing team. (The final nominee is Feras Fayad’s The Cave, notably produced by Kirstine Barfod and Sigrid Jonsson Dyekjær.)
For Sama began as a record of the tragedies that so many don’t see, and turned into an essential, enormous archive of footage taking the documentary world by storm this awards season. There have been, and will be, many other documentaries about Syria, but what makes For Sama unique is its female eye behind the camera.
Looking forward to a future as a new mother and young wife to the love of her life, Hamza, Waad al-Kateab was never afforded the freedom to simply savor young motherhood. From age 21 she filmed the horrors and small joys of every-day life in rebel-held Aleppo covering five years of political uprising. This included the taxing day-to-day work of her doctor husband and their friends in the small hospital they ran on courage and donations.
That Waad made it out of Syria with her 500 hours of footage is no small miracle. Having gained refuge in London, she partnered with Emmy-award winning director Edward Watts to shape the film. We see her grow as a storyteller and become more courageous in her focus, zooming closer into wounds and keeping the camera rolling, even when those on screen are drawing their very last breaths.
For Sama has made waves around the world since premiering at SXSW in 2019. It’s an overwhelming experience; fearless filmmaking that captures the immense and urgent extremities of human joy and suffering. David Ehrlich called the film a “bracingly horrific yet resiliently beautiful documentary”. Graham Williamson noted that “beauty, in For Sama, is a reminder of humanity, a reminder that people still live and give birth and play and laugh and fall in love in these places, as well as just die”. Many other Letterboxd members could only quote al-Kateab’s poetic narration directly, to describe their intense emotional responses to the film:
“My first baby, Sama. Her name is meaning ‘the sky’. Sky we love, sky we want. Without air forces. Without bombing. Sky with sun, with clouds. With birds.”
This is what the filmmaker says of her daughter, epitomizing the hope that was never lost, that allowed her to be where she is today. Waad and Edward spoke to Letterboxd correspondent Ella Kemp just as our 2019 Year in Review went live, with their film topping the documentary list.
For Sama is the highest-rated documentary of 2019 on Letterboxd. It’s also the highest rated feature-length documentary of the 2010s, and is in our top ten documentaries of all-time. How does that make you feel?
Edward Watts: That’s incredible.
Waad al-Kateab: To know that and to see that the film isn’t just doing well as a Syrian mission but in the film industry, it really means a lot to us.
EW: And to know that it’s reaching so many people is such good news. The dream was always that the film would reach many people and they would come in contact with this incredible story.
How did the film come together from over 500 hours of footage?
WaK: I worked with Ed for two years to shape the film’s story, to decide what we wanted to keep and take out. We were open to trying everything. We had really amazing editors who were also so flexible with us and would let us try anything.
EW: It was about the meeting of our two perspectives as well. Obviously Waad had lived the experience, she was the insider. It was her story and in so many ways it was her people’s story, and I was coming to it from the point of view of an audience, of an outsider, albeit one that cared passionately about Syria and what happened there. The beginning part of the process was understanding our two perspectives and what was important to both of them, where they met in the middle. It was like sculpting, gradually working down this huge, extraordinary and powerful archive, and the shape of the film gradually taking form.
Ed, you’ve praised Waad’s footage for capturing “the full spectrum of humanity”. How did you find that balance in the final cut?
EW: That was one of the reasons it took two years—it was a very complicated process to find that balance. In a lot of our earlier versions we didn’t have that balance. When it was told chronologically, you started in a place of light and hope, those positive emotions of the early days of the revolution. But then it was kind of a straight line down into the darkness and you ended with this long section during the siege and all of the hardship that involved.
It was too much, the audiences we showed early on became overwhelmed by the darkness at the end. It was a real journey. Because that wasn’t the truth of the experience, that was clear from the footage but also from Waad and Hamza themselves. The truth of the experience was that full spectrum of human emotion, so it was about finding the best way to reflect that by always thinking to ourselves, we’ve just had something really horrific, how do we bring it to the light? How do we keep it moving so that we never get stuck in one emotional place? When we changed the chronological structure to move around in time, that helped hugely.
Waad, in this film you’re omnipresent as a filmmaker, a citizen journalist, a mother, a wife. How do you see these roles informing each other?
WaK: They were all mixed together while working on the film and living in those circumstances. In one second it was most important to be the journalist and the filmmaker, focusing on how I should shoot something, but then it would always still be so important to keep my awareness as a mother to protect my child and keep hope all the time. Sometimes you feel as a mum that you can’t leave, that you can’t film and abandon the one-year-old child—but this is what life was in those circumstances, it’s all mixed. I was just trying to live everything as much as I could to give it the right work and effort.
The finished product frames women’s domesticity in an urgent way. There’s war, there’s violence, there’s men fighting, but there’s also all the women behind and alongside it.
WaK: In all the films and reports from Syria, we’ve never felt like our voice is heard. Even if there are female characters in movies, no one has their own voice in that loud way. There are layers of feeling happening very deeply to reflect the truest experience. We’ve never seen films like this. When I was doing the film I was focusing on how I can reflect the experience exactly, one that can speak to everything I love, everything I hate, everything I was scared about, to be honest with all the women and mothers who lived through that, who can see themselves in my shoes and see what I’ve done for Sama and for my work as well.
You film so viscerally, always going further, rather than choosing when to censor or cut away. Were there ever lines you felt you couldn’t cross?
WaK: I think I crossed a lot of lines. One of the important reasons I had no limitations was because while I was filming, I never expected to stay alive. In everything I was doing, I thought, I could be dead tomorrow. So I kept filming, going deeply through all the fears we were living. It allowed me to be okay with everything, because I’m not a foreign journalist coming to film other people’s suffering. I’m living through that, and I know exactly what it means. I think that’s why if I were to make the film now and I knew I would survive, there might be many things I wouldn’t have filmed in that way.
When did you decide on the perspective of the narration, in addressing the film to Sama, Waad’s daughter?
EW: The idea didn’t come until we were two thirds of the way through the whole process of crafting the film. When you’re living with this material for so long, suddenly you can hear it in a different way and suddenly it begins to speak to you. It was a moment of epiphany where we tuned into that essence of the film, not only in the way that Waad and Hamza had lived was for Sama, but the way Waad had shot the footage had a conversation going on with Sama, even before Sama was born, in the way Waad filmed her pregnancy. It was just one of those moments where we found the key that unlocked everything, and everything fell into place. Hamza is a very stoical person, but we called him up when we had this idea and Waad explained, and he started crying. That’s how we knew it was a good idea.
WaK: By linking everything to Sama, it becomes about not just Sama as my daughter but also as an idea of the future in general, hope, everything we were fighting for. Sama was one simple example of why the struggle existed. Everyone around me felt they could name the film for their own kids too. It really touched everyone who went through that experience in different ways. Everyone who has kids, everyone who dreams of having kids, even those who don’t want to bring kids into this world but have a stake in the future and are fighting for something for themselves, or for their country, or for their life.
You’ve said before that films can’t change the world. What do you hope for the legacy of For Sama?
WaK: Films can’t change the world but people can. People who could be engaged in the film and really want to do something. That’s why we didn’t stop at making For Sama a film—that’s why we launched our impact campaign, Action For Sama. We ask people to react to what’s happening right now in Syria, to the bombing of hospitals and civilians, to make a movement.
EW: I had this great conversation, admittedly with one of those people you find in Los Angeles full of wacky ideas. I said, “films can’t change the world,” and he said, “man, what are you talking about! Your film is changing the soul of mankind!”. It was a bit much, but there’s something about this film that has connected people with what happened in Syria in such a visceral, emotional and personal way.
I wonder whether maybe it is part of the change that’s happening, that hopefully people will start seeing how connected we all are and that one day we might not live in a world where crimes are committed with impunity in the Middle East or elsewhere and we wring our hands and say that there’s nothing we can do. I really hope that this film is part of this sense that in order to solve the world’s problems and to stand up against these crimes and these tyrants, we all need to work together.
What film first made you want to be a filmmaker?
EW: My parents were never together, and I only saw my dad once a month. He was a huge film lover, that was the thing that he chose us to bond over. He showed me Yellow Submarine, that trippy Beatles film. I got obsessed with the flying glove. And then he showed me a film called Séance on a Wet Afternoon, and I watched that when I was eight and didn’t know what the hell was going on. There was something about his passion for film that I drank in at a very early age.
WaK: I really don’t know the answer and have never thought about it. Even when I started filming, I’d never really thought I would be in this position as a director. What really makes me want to make films is the fact that we had such a lack of media and freedom in our country. Because we felt that there was nothing allowed to us, not to watch, not to do. Everything was totally under their control. That’s why I felt that I wanted to do something we couldn’t really hear or see before, which is why For Sama came to be.
What do you think of the specific strength of documentary as a form?
WaK: I didn’t really watch many other things in the past. I’ve been watching documentaries here, one of the things I watched and really loved was American Factory. The other one was The Great Hack. The Biggest Little Farm, One Child Nation. Most of the people who are with us in this category! The only thing I knew about documentary was my point of view. When I watch these other movies, I admire all these people and love their films, and enjoy how you can see the world through different points of view.
EW: This is the great age for documentary. I’ve been making docs for over ten years. I think documentary is the right form for these crazy days we’re living through. These days of great turbulence, when the history of humanity is at such a critical juncture. I think documentaries in their reality, in their ability to tell us so much about who we really are, and these amazing people who are around the world, living extraordinary lives and showing the best of courage and humanity and difficult circumstances, I think that’s why they’re resonating more and more. Because sadly the world is more and more troubled.
One of the earliest documentaries that I loved was Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country—it was just an example of a country I’d never been to, a story that was so hard to tell, and yet, similar to this, it was told through the footage of the people who had actually lived through it. It’s such an extraordinary story of hope, and human beings’ desire for freedom, and then the violence of dictators that crashed that. Nothing like a documentary can capture that emotion when you’re dealing with events of such magnitude.
Which Syrian filmmakers and films should Letterboxd members seek out?
WaK: There’s a filmmaker called Ossama Mohammed, he has a film called Silvered Water. There’s also Omar Amiralay, and Ziad Kalthoum, who did Taste of Cement. There are so many about people who maybe you haven’t heard of, but who really created cinema for Syria, who were trying to work in very hard circumstances while everything was happening.
On the red carpet in Cannes you held up a sign: “Stop bombing hospitals”. What do you feel about your role at these kinds of events across awards season?
WaK: I see myself as a Syrian woman who believes in this cause, and that’s why I made the film. I really believe that any filmmaker has a cause in their life and that’s why they’re really doing a lot things, out of passion. On every platform we can reach with For Sama, it really needs to be about Syria, and for Syria, and for the people, for this experience which I can’t just move on from.
That’s why we held the signs, that’s why in everything we are trying to do now, it’s always about how we can shed light on what’s happening. I hope we can continue to do that. We don’t do films for nothing. We want to be useful as much as we can, to be the voice for our own people and doing more for the future.
‘For Sama’ is currently streaming on PBS Frontline in the US and on Channel 4 in the UK. The 92nd Academy Awards will be held on 9 February 2020. All images courtesy of PBS Distribution.
