Review: â€˜For Sama’ tells of a mother’s searing choice for a daughter born into war

Guns rattle, dark plumes rise and a child is born into war. Her small life is a diary of the blood, pain and rubble that have shattered Syria. A new documentary about her, “For Sama,� is a riveting gaze of a family enduring barrel bombs, death and the bounds of love in a land of a new century’s atrocities.

Waad al-Kateab, who co-directed the film, was determined her daughter Sama would have a record not only of the destruction of her city, Aleppo, but of the bravery and humor that held a neighborhood together against the forces of President Bashar Assad. Narrated in Kateab’s lullaby voice, the film is a mother’s earnest explanation of why she didn’t bundle up her child and flee to safety.

“Sama, you’re the most beautiful thing in our life,� Kateab says. “But what life have I brought you into? You didn’t choose this. Will you ever forgive me?�

“For Sama� is a nursery rhyme whispered from a nation’s horrors, a plea for never forgetting. Kateab’s unflinching camera and sparse sentences — war has no use for adjectives — track her university life, falling in love, marrying a doctor, giving birth to Sama, finding a house, planting a tree. Those images are poisoned by menace as tank shells fly and boys, faces white from bomb dust, stroke the hair and kiss the forehead of a fallen brother. Streets shudder, buildings collapse. Mothers wail.

The Syrian war, which has killed an estimated 400,000, has slipped into the world’s subconscious, a terrible thing happening far away. It started with a joyous rebellion against an autocrat and ended, like much of the ill-fated Arab Spring, with broken refugees and crushed ideals. Those early days in 2011-12, when protesters marched in Syria, Egypt, Libya and Yemen, were betrayed by duplicity, armies and fresh graves.

Kateab and co-director Edward Watts reveal how community is family. To give up on your city is to forsake who you are. A soul ripped from its home cannot bear witness to the final massacre; it cannot rebuild the land that gave it meaning. This is what Kateab, a citizen journalist who filed dispatches for British TV, and her husband, Hamza, who started a hospital to tend the wounded, want Sama to know. But they have dangerously balanced their daughter between patriotism and parenthood.

Kateab is a sensitive and powerful storyteller. Her film is stubborn and pure; her soothing voice is a lament threaded with steel. Like the most perceptive cinema and literature about war, “For Sama� is a tale of intimate moments subsumed by history’s violent churn. A mother cherishes the gift of a single persimmon. The city crumbles at the edges. Peril creeps closer, and neighborhoods become eerie islands awaiting inevitable doom. The enemy is often invisible: the sound of gunfire in an alley, a bomb dropping through twilight.

Tragedy comes as strange punctuation; a life is here, then gone, a dream for a nation denied. There are untold Kateabs across the Middle East and North Africa. The Arab uprisings veered from celebration to dismay. “For Sama� is a wrenching, indelible reminder of the human spirit and the cost of fighting a tyrant. At times, you want Kateab — is she being irresponsible? — to take her daughter and go. You know she cannot, even as she notes that Sama doesn’t cry like “normal� children. The prattle of a Kalashnikov no longer startles.

But the moment comes late in 2016 when there is no choice. The world is too timid; Assad will stay in power over a carved-up Syria. Aleppo lies battered. Bombed streets become paths to exile. Kateab takes her daughter and walks through what once was. War leaves a sliver between memory and loss. The defeated are left with sacks of possessions and calendars of the years-long battle they fought.

“It was all for you, Sama,� says Kateab.

One suspects that when Sama is old enough to know, she will be proud her parents laid claim to a dream, no matter how elusive.