For Sama

See the trailer here.

For Sama is just incredible as it is both an intimate and epic journey into the female experience of war. It’s also very clever film making. 

It’s a love letter from a young mother to her daughter and it tells the story of Waad al-Kateab’s life through five years of the uprising in Aleppo, Syria as she falls in love, gets married and gives birth to Sama, all while cataclysmic conflict rises around her. And we complain about the weather.

Her camera captures incredible stories of loss, laughter and survival as Waad wrestles with an impossible choice–whether or not to flee the city to protect her daughter’s life, when leaving means abandoning the struggle for freedom for which she has already sacrificed so much.