For Sama

For Sama (2019) is a British-Syrian war documentary you can watch online on iFILM, co-directed by Waad al-Kateab and Edward Watts. Shot over five years inside besieged Aleppo, it is structured as a video letter from a young mother to the daughter born in the middle of the fighting.

Waad al-Kateab arrived in Aleppo as a student when the Syrian uprising began. She stayed as a journalist, fell for field surgeon Hamza al-Khateab, married him, and gave birth to Sama in a basement while shells landed above them. The camera is always on — capturing a crying operating room and a laughing one an hour apart, children playing in rubble, a city that refuses to go quiet. The central dilemma is brutal and real: leaving means abandoning the cause that already cost so many friends their lives; staying means gambling with a newborn.

The film landed BAFTA's Best Documentary award and an Academy Award nomination for the same category. What makes it land harder than most conflict journalism is the absence of a framing narrator — al-Kateab's own voice, speaking to Sama, carries every moral question the war raises. Stream For Sama (2019) online on iFILM.