REFLECTION | For Sama

2019 | 1hr 40mins | Documentary | Rated 18 | Dir. Waad al-Kateab & Edward Watts

I put off watching For Sama for far too long. A documentary that I knew contained horrors of the Syrian conflict that would no doubt shock, disturb and upset me as I watched it. Of course, I was right. Just one of the countless indicators of my privilege as a white, British, middle-class male that this film frankly illuminates; simply choosing not to engage with something that will make me sad. Continuing to live in peaceful ignorance. For this, I am ashamed.

However, my personal feelings are abhorrently irrelevant compared to the events of For Sama. The footage is solely captured by the film’s creator Waad al-Kateab, a journalist based in Aleppo, and is structured as a message to her daughter: Sama. Beginning with her days at university, documenting the peaceful protests that would eventually escalate to the full Aleppo uprising against the militant Syrian government (led by Bashar al-Assad), Russian airstrikes and Islamic Extremists. Caught in the middle of this mortifying, seemingly never-ending conflict were the rebels and inhabitants of Aleppo – refusing to flee and give up their city as it crumbled around them, as so many others understandably chose to do. Waad was at the heart of it. Relentlessly filming everything she could, knowing all too well the significance of raw, unedited footage. Led by her doctor friend Hamza, her small group constructed a makeshift hospital and devoted themselves to saving lives and protecting the injured. In the absence of a government that has even the slightest inclination to protect its people, Hamza, Waad and their friends became the last hope of salvation for the people of Aleppo.

Let me be clear, some of the imagery Waad records at the hospital is some of the most harrowing and heart-breaking imagery I’ve ever seen on film. The camera does not shy away from the numerous dead children – nor does it neglect the tears of grieving mothers nor the cries of young boys mourning their brother lying dead in their arms. And so it shouldn’t. This is not entertainment. This is life in the modern day. No number of news reports or statistics can give you even a shred of empathy compared to overwhelmingly visceral experience that For Sama provides. Yet still, for all the tears you may spill and for all the aching your heart can handle, it is still incomparable to the real thing. Watching this film, I personally believe, is the least you can do.

While the footage was as painful as I expected, it is not what makes For Sama a 5-star watching experience. For at the heart of all this death and desolation is Sama. Having proposed in their makeshift hospital, Hamza and Waad get married. Their wedding is small and improvised; at one point they jokingly suggest to keep the music loud to drown out the exploding shells coming from the streets outside. Soon, Waad falls pregnant. Despite her internal moral struggle with the notion of raising a child in a warzone, nine months later she gives birth to a baby girl: Sama. For Sama, as it titularly suggests, is a letter from Waad to her daughter – at points begging her forgiveness for keeping and raising her in such an inhospitable environment. Waad speaks directly to her daughter’s future self, explaining how the sense of duty felt by her and Hamza to help, protect and serve the people of Aleppo was too strong to ignore.

The bravery of Waad, Hamza and their friends cannot be overstated, nor can the content of their character or the strength of their spirits. In a crumbling city, covered in blood and ash, they refused to run away. Somehow, they continue to laugh and smile while the walls shake around them. As food and supplies become sparse, Waad’s best friend is overjoyed when her husband surprises her with a persimmon, before joking that the siege can continue as planned now that she has her fruit. She also runs an underground school so that the local children can still access some form of education. In an effort to create a sense of community, her husband buys some art supplies and organises an art session in which the children paint an old bus. When asked what happened to the bus, his five-year-old daughter replies that it was ‘hit by a cluster bomb’. No matter how much paint or fruit the adults can throw at their situation, even the youngest members of their community know all too well the tragic reality.

This is the balance of For Sama. Adversity in the face of despair. Sheltering and nurturing life while surrounded by death. Sama herself is not only the offspring of two ferociously devoted and wholeheartedly endearing parents, but a beacon of hope. One piece of footage shows Hamza, Waad and Sama sneaking back into Aleppo to help their friends. When they arrive, Waad remarks how, most of all, her friends were happiest to see Sama; her smiling face welcome respite to the constant terror they faced. The girl born in hellfire, living to see another day.

- Ewan Cadwallader

REFLECTION | Queen & Slim

2019 | 2hr 12mins | Crime Drama Romance | Rated 15 | Dir. Melina Matsouka

Education – it goes a long way. That was my initial reaction to Melina Matsouka’s romantic road crime drama, Queen & Slim, and one that I still hold to this day. Although released in 2019 it was not a film I had heard of until the summer of 2020, when protests erupted in the aftermath to the murder of George Floyd and subsequently flooded the mainstream news outlets across the globe. Social media turned, rightfully, into platforms to enable – not disable – the voices of the marginalised communities and it was upon these sites, whilst absorbing all the information I could about various movements, predominately Black Lives Matter, that I stumbled upon a cultural resource. 

This resource came in the form of a list, a list of films, to help educate those who had never seen the brutality of the American police force translated onto the screen before. To say I was curious is an uncomfortable truth to have to write, but one I write, nonetheless. I, a white woman, like many people living in the privileged west, know of racism, know victims of it, and know it still exists very much in the structures and attitudes of our society whether consciously acknowledged or not. To say it was an uncomfortable watch is not a dishonest review but one that does not give justice to the film or the portrayal of its leading characters: Queen and Slim, played respectively by Jodie Turner-Smith and Daniel Kaluuya. The 132-minute run time centres on a young black couple who go on the run after killing a police officer during a traffic stop. This is a tag line and one you will often see in descriptors surrounding this film and its plot. Queen & Slim offers us much more than an awareness to police brutality and racial injustice in America and the remaining west, it offers us tenderness. This is found in both the depiction of what it means for a man to take another’s life as well as, in the budding relationship, and bond, forged between two people who, in different circumstances, would not have ever seen each other or spoken again. 

It is within the tender moments of Matsouka’s direction, that arrive and depart much like the camera refractions from the costal shots, that allow the audience the opportunity to engage in a conversation not only about race, and the continuously failing ‘justice’ system of the United States, but of the moral implications of the triggering event that she directs. We, much like the characters involved, are made to feel as those what we saw was the truth despite everyone having their own version of the event that took place: the killing of a white police officer. What Matsouka sets up is a scenario we are all very much aware happens and choose to let slide: American police officers performing arbitrary traffic stops on the black community. As the second scene begins, we are pulled into the film by its direction, the camera focusing on the couple from the front of the car as Slim drives and Queen plays with his phone, distracting him so he swerves. Kaluuya and Turner-Smith find a natural rhythm with each other as they adopt the dialogue that Lena Waithe, the writer of the film’s screenplay, produced for them to use. It is within these comfortable moments, in the laughter and teasings of the characters as they awkwardly try to navigate each other’s space, that Matsouka’s skill as a director comes into fruition. We, much like the black community that Queen and Slim belong to, begin to feel comfortable. It is only in the jarring moments of the deep-rooted racism that the United States perpetuates, that we remember an uncomfortable truth that is many people’s realities: black people are not allowed to become comfortable in a world designed for white western privilege. 

What then follows is an event that we have come to anticipate but not correct in American culture, a white police officer pulls his gun and fires to stop Turner-Smith’s character, Queen, from filming her and her date from being harassed by him, someone who is meant to protect and serve all American citizens. Yet, what jolts us as an audience how the scenario flips itself so that the white police officer is the one to end up dead on the ground as Slim grabbles with him to get the gun away, leading it to fire and, consequently, kill the police officer whom they are being harassed by. All of this occurs within the first 15 minutes of the film and what is most startling to me is not the killing of a police officer, although that was unexpected and horrifying despite his racist behaviour, but the look in Slim’s eyes as he realises his life is over: he killed a white cop.

It is in the initial aftermath of the killing, when the screen turns black and scene three begins as a title sequence, that we hear the voiceover of Queen and Slim as they argue over what to do. We all know from the start that as soon as the trigger was pulled their lives would be on a countdown to their deaths, rapidly accelerated by the events that take place across the run time. What we did not know is that throughout the course of this film, the heightened emotions and pressures of being killers on the run would allow these two people who had an awkward first date to fall in love, sharing parts of themselves to each other that they both have previously neglected to share. It is in Queen’s last words: ‘can I be your legacy?’ that cut the deepest for me as a viewer because as we watch their lives run out in front of us, we know this could have been prevented. What we can take away from Queen & Slim is the tenderness and compassion nearly all the characters they interact with on the road show them in some various ways or forms. They may not be the nicest, or most pleasant people, but they come together displaying a form of kindness that we should all learn from and move forward with. The poet and essayist Audre Lorde said it best when she wrote: 

‘’We must each of us recognise our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own... For instance, ‘I can’t possibly teach Black women’s writing – their experience is so different from mine’. Yet how many years have you spent teaching Plato and Shakespeare and Proust? Or another, ‘She’s a white woman and lesbian, what would my husband say, or my chairman?’ Or again, ‘This woman writes of her sons and I have no children.’ And all the other endless ways in which we rob ourselves of ourselves and each other.’’

It is within these words that I hold hope, because to share in another’s experience is to express an understanding of something outside of yourself. Much like the beginning of this review I echo the statement that education goes a long way, but I shall add to it now too. Education goes a long way but so does compassion, and that is what Queen & Slim depicts but also teaches its viewers.

- Megan Brady