For Sama

Waad al-Kateab and Edward Watts's For Sama won the L'Œil d'or (Golden Eye) for Best Documentary at Cannes 2019 and the BAFTA for Best Documentary the following year. The film also received the Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature. Al-Kateab (a young woman who had been documenting the Syrian uprising in besieged Aleppo since 2011) assembled the film from over 500 hours of personal footage shot during the five years she lived through the siege of Eastern Aleppo.

The film is structured as a letter to her infant daughter Sama, born during the siege, explaining the city al-Kateab and her doctor husband Hamza had decided to remain in even as it was bombed to rubble across the years 2012-2016. The footage moves between the small Aleppo hospital where Hamza worked (one of the last functional medical facilities in the city), the family's domestic life, the wedding al-Kateab and Hamza had during the siege, and the slow forced evacuation of the city's eastern districts in late 2016.

The film operates simultaneously as personal-letter form, hospital-procedural witness, and historical document of the Aleppo siege. Al-Kateab's commitment to keeping the camera running through hospital trauma, through family intimacy, through bombardment, produced a body of footage whose ethical and emotional weight has been written about extensively. The film became one of the most-cited works of war-witness documentary of the 2010s.