Episode: 112 — "The Story of Aleppo, My Daughter and My Husband" · Full Episode #112
Guest: Waad Al-Khateeb
Date: 8 March 2022
Waad Al-Khateeb's parents left Syria three days before the United States premiere of For Sama.
The film had been completed. The international release was scheduled. The trajectory of the months ahead — the major festival circuit, the BAFTA, the Academy Awards campaign — was visible. What was equally visible was what the publication of the film would mean for any family members still inside Syria. For Sama documented, in concentrated form, the version of the Syrian war that the regime had spent years trying to keep off international screens. Its release would not produce a quiet diplomatic protest. It would produce a regime decision about whether the relatives of the director would continue to be permitted to live where they had been living.
The calculation was straightforward. The premiere date was fixed. The exit had to happen before the date. The margin the family was able to achieve was three days.
The three days are not a piece of dramatic timing. They are evidence of a particular fact about the Syrian regime's reach and the family's calculation of it. Earlier exits would have required earlier decisions that the family was not in a position to make. Later exits — even one day later — were not considered safe. The premiere was the trigger. The family arranged the departure to clear the trigger by a margin that allowed no error.
For Sama is, in international reception, a film of witness. It is, for its director's family, also a film of dislocation. The international success of the film required the family to leave the country in which the film was made. The two facts are connected. They are not connected as cause-and-effect in any simple sense — the regime's hostility to the family pre-existed the film — but the film made the previous arrangements untenable. The film accelerated what was already going to happen.
Waad does not present this as a tragedy. She presents it as the price the film charged, and as a price she would pay again. The Damiri conversation in EP 112 is the place where she makes the cost visible, briefly, before returning to the work.
Episode 112 is recorded in early March 2022, in the first weeks of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The world is watching a second besieged country in real time. The frame Waad has organised her public testimony around — the city, the hospital, the letter to the daughter — is being reapplied to a new geography. Asked how she is doing, she replies: "I am not okay today. Not at all, at all, at all."
The three days before the premiere belong to this answer. They are part of the accumulated weight that the question, asked in early 2022, lands on.
The story is a study in the secondary costs of testimony. The primary costs — the years inside the siege, the bombed hospital, the friends lost — are visible in the film. The secondary costs — the family that had to leave, the country that closed permanently behind the project, the long subsequent life in which the film keeps returning — are the part the festival-circuit reception does not record. The three days are the marker of that second register.