Episode: 110 — "The Documentary That Changed My Life" · Full Episode #110
Guest: Waad Al-Khateeb
Date: 1 March 2022
Over the years she lived inside besieged Aleppo, Waad Al-Khateeb accumulated approximately five hundred hours of footage. The archive was not, in its early years, an organised filmmaking project. It was the working record of a young woman with a camera living inside a war, recording what was in front of her because the recording felt like work that the moment required.
The footage included the underground hospital her husband Hamza ran. It included the bombings and the rebuildings. It included the patients who came through the hospital's doors, some of whom did not leave. It included the streets of east Aleppo across the years they were being progressively destroyed. It included the birth of her daughter Sama, named after the sky and born inside a siege. It included, inevitably, Waad herself — although for six months in the edit she refused to accept that she could be a subject of her own film.
The footage was eventually edited into a ninety-five-minute feature documentary titled For Sama. The film was released in March 2019. It went on to win the BAFTA for Best Documentary in 2020, the Cannes L'Œil d'Or for Best Documentary in 2019, and to be nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 92nd Academy Awards, becoming the most-awarded documentary in its release year.
The film's framing — a letter from a mother to her daughter, explaining why the parents stayed in a city that was being destroyed — was the compromise that resolved the question of who the film was about. Waad would not accept that she was the subject. She agreed that her daughter was the subject. The letter format allowed her presence in the film to be testimony rather than centring.
Five hundred hours to ninety-five minutes is a compression ratio of approximately three hundred to one. The figure is not incidental. It is the work of the editor — Chris Cake and Maja Lindström, with Waad — to select, from the hours of accumulated recording, the ninety-five minutes that carried the testimony without diluting it. The unselected four hundred and ninety-eight hours and twenty-five minutes are themselves the archive. Each rejection was an argument. Each rejection sits inside the film as something the film knew but did not say.
The story is, on one register, a piece of filmmaking history. On another, it is a study in what citizen documentation looks like when it works.
Citizen documentation has been, since 2011, the dominant mode through which the Arab uprisings have been recorded internationally. The phone-shot, the building-roof angle, the camera that does not have professional kit behind it — these have produced the visual record. For Sama is the upper end of that mode. It is what citizen documentation can become when one of the citizens doing the documentation turns out to be a filmmaker, and when the archive she has accumulated is large enough to allow an edit.
The story sits next to Hassan Akkad's Syrian footage, Osama Alfitory's work as a fixer in Benghazi, and the broader Damiri thread about people who arrived at filmmaking through emergency rather than training.