For Sama (2019)

FOR SAMA  (2019)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Waad Al-Khateab, Edward Watts
Here's a movie that's hard to watch and even harder to forget: a documentary about the siege of Aleppo, the Syrian city that paid for its role as the center of resistance to the Assad regime by being bombed into the ground. I'm not sure why it's considered more heinous for a government to kill its own people than to kill somebody else's, but there's no doubt that what the Syrian government and its Russian allies did to Aleppo was an atrocity, and Waad Al-Khateab, a journalist at ground zero with a video camera, doesn't cut away from any of it. This is not war as an abstraction. It's dead bodies and mass graves, little kids with PTSD and blood on the floor of the city's only remaining hospital, wailing women clutching the corpses of their children and bombing so constant that when a shell explodes just a block away, you don't even flinch anymore. In the middle of it all, and in the middle of the movie, there's a birth at the hospital. The mother's been brought in wounded, and the baby comes out lifeless, still. The doctors massage it, try CPR, slap its bottom, massage it some more. There's no response. This goes on for a minute, maybe a minute and a half, and still nothing. It's hopeless. You wonder why they bother. And then - the baby opens its eyes and begins to stir. It's not moving much, but it's wriggling. In the middle of hell, a miracle. A single human life. It takes your breath away.