Filmmaker Waad al-Kateab documented the bombing and fighting in Syria, until she was forced to flee with her family.
, and Waad al-Kateab, who co-directed “For Sama” with Edward Watts, estimates she’s seen her children for less than two hours since the announcement. It’s been a whirlwind few months for Kateab, who has created a home here since fleeing Syria at the end of 2016.
Kateab started shooting footage in Aleppo in 2011, first using her mobile phone and then using a small handheld camera. Originally, she wanted to document the protests against the Syrian regime like many activists in the city, but she found herself filming more and more, eventually learning to distance her personal experiences from footage of current events.
“I put them all in one backpack,” she remembers. “I was three months pregnant with Taima, so I had a little bit of pregnancy, and it was December, so very cold. I wore the backpack backwards over my stomach and put my big coat over it and then Sama was sitting over all of this. That’s when we crossed the border. I didn’t know what to do.”
Once Kateab arrived in Turkey, Channel 4 expedited U.K. visas for her and her family, bringing her in for a meeting in February 2017. The filmmaker had been sending footage to Channel 4 for their series “Inside Aleppo” and the original thought was to make a longer news piece with her footage. But it soon became clear that this could be a bigger project. She and Watts spent two years going through footage and determining the best way to tell the story .
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