Episodes: 110 — "The Documentary That Changed My Life" · Full Episode #110 | 112 — "The Story of Aleppo, My Daughter and My Husband" · Full Episode #112
Dates: 1 March 2022 (EP 110); 8 March 2022 (EP 112)
Language: Arabic, with English film-industry references
Waad Al-Khateeb (وعد الخطيب) is a Syrian filmmaker. She is the director of For Sama, the 2019 documentary about the siege of Aleppo recorded over the years she lived inside the city as it was destroyed. The film was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 92nd Academy Awards, won the BAFTA for Best Documentary in 2020, and the Cannes L'Œil d'Or for Best Documentary in 2019, alongside more than fifty other prizes — making For Sama the most-awarded documentary in the year of its release.
She is a former marketing student at the University of Aleppo. She was studying when the Syrian revolution broke in 2011. She did not become a filmmaker by choice or training; she became one because she was a young woman with a camera living inside a siege, and the recording continued past the point at which the act of recording became a profession.
Waad appeared on Damiri across two episodes recorded in early March 2022, in the first month of the Russian invasion of Ukraine — a context in which the question of the documentarian inside an active siege had returned to global news. Episode 110 is the broad biography. Episode 112 is the deeper material.
Across the years of the siege, Waad accumulated approximately five hundred hours of footage from inside Aleppo. The archive was not assembled with a finished film in mind. It was assembled because she was inside a war and filming was the work she was doing. The edit that became For Sama drew from those five hundred hours and ran ninety-five minutes. The compression ratio is the document.
See: The Five Hundred Hour Archive
When the edit of what would become For Sama began to take shape, the editors and producers around the project pressed her on the question of who the film was about. The footage was an archive of the city, the hospital, the husband, the daughter, the patients, the dead. It was also, inevitably, an archive of the woman holding the camera. For approximately six months Waad refused to accept that she was the film's subject. Her position was that the city was the subject, the hospital was the subject, Sama — her daughter, born during the siege — was the subject, but that she herself was not.
The structural framing of For Sama as a letter from a mother to her daughter is, in part, the resolution of this six-month negotiation. Waad agreed to be visible in the film once the film's framing made the visibility part of the testimony rather than a centring of the director's persona.
Hamza Al-Khateeb is Waad's husband. He is a physician. Throughout the siege he ran an underground hospital in Aleppo — one of the last functioning medical facilities in the eastern part of the city. The hospital was bombed and rebuilt multiple times. The film carries Hamza's work as one of its primary documentary subjects. The marriage and the medicine are not, in Waad's framing, separable from the film's content. They are the content.
In Episode 112 Waad delivers the line that organises this part of her testimony: "Even though I lost Aleppo, I see Aleppo through this person's eyes every day." The line is about Hamza. The city she lost is preserved in the man she married inside it.
Waad and Hamza married during the siege. The decision was not romantic in the conventional sense. The siege had no end date. Deferring life decisions — marriage, children — until the siege ended was equivalent, in their reading, to ceding the siege the power to dictate the shape of their lives. They married because they refused to defer.
The daughter, Sama, was born inside the siege. The name became the film's title — Sama means "sky," and the framing of the film is a letter from Waad to her daughter explaining why her parents stayed in a city that was being destroyed.
Before the revolution, Waad and her family had an emigration plan to Germany. The plan was conventional — Syria in the 2000s had a generation of young professionals planning the same exit, for the same set of reasons. The revolution interrupted the plan. The decision to stay in Aleppo was not an absence of options. It was a refusal to take the option that was on the table when the option of remaining and being part of the work became real.
Episode 112 is the second of the two conversations. It is darker and more recent in its emotional weather.
The episode contains one of Damiri's most unguarded lines from a guest of Waad's profile. Asked about how she is doing, she replies: "I am not okay today. Not at all, at all, at all." The repetition is not rhetorical. The episode is recorded in early March 2022, in the first weeks of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Waad is watching a second besieged city being recorded by a second generation of citizen filmmakers, and the experience is not abstract. She is not okay today, and she is not pretending she is.
The most concrete piece of new information in EP 112 is the timing of her parents' departure from Syria. They got out of Syria three days before the US premiere of For Sama. The film was the reason a regime that had let them remain in Syria for years suddenly could not be expected to continue letting them. The departure was a calculation: the premiere would publish, internationally, the version of the war the regime had spent years trying to suppress, and the family members still inside the country would be exposed to the consequences of that publication. Three days was the margin.
See: Three Days Before the Premiere
For Sama was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2020. Waad attended the ceremony. A portion of the Arab social-media reaction to her appearance focused not on the film, not on the testimony, not on the years of footage, but on her clothing — specifically, on her hijab and how it was worn. The episode contains her brief, dry commentary on this fact. The film had documented the destruction of a city. The discussion was about the head covering.
The critique is treated on the episode less as personal grievance and more as a diagnostic. The Arab audience that responded by litigating her dress was not the audience the film had been made for, and was not the audience that the film's international success required her to manage. The litigation was a Libyan-Arab-region phenomenon she had not anticipated and which she addressed with visible reluctance.
The episode closes on the line that organises Waad's relationship to the city: "Even though I lost Aleppo, I see Aleppo through this person's eyes every day." Hamza is the city as continuing person. The loss of place is not absolute when the people who made the place are still in the room.
"I am not okay today. Not at all, at all, at all." (EP 112)
"Even though I lost Aleppo, I see Aleppo through this person's eyes every day." — on Hamza (EP 112)
"We refused to defer our lives." — on marrying inside the siege (EP 110)