Waad al-Kateab’s documentary Death Without Mercy collects agonising experience from the aftermath of 2023. She reflects on a natural disaster made much worse by politics, and how she is trying to help
aad al-Kateab has always looked for hope, but when it came to making her latest documentary, Death Without Mercy, the moments were difficult to find. After the nightmarish earthquake shookand Syria in February 2023, she felt hopeless counting the passing seconds, hours and days from her home in east London as she waited for an emergency visa to visit her family in Gaziantep city, near the Syrian border she crossed years earlier fleeing the Assad regime.
The film begins with shaky CCTV footage as buildings flatten within minutes in the pre-dawn hours of 6 February. We find people entombed by broken slabs, powdered with concrete dust as they record what may be their final words. Others scream for help, but none comes. “We heard them, they were shouting ‘Save us, rescue us!’” a tearful man tells a camera near the film’s beginning. “We can’t save them.
On one side, we follow Fadi as he attempts to cross the border from the “prison” of north-west Syria. After he is repeatedly turned away, he reaches the city in Turkey’s southern Hatay province to learn 13 of his relatives have died. “Do you know what I’m thinking?” Fadi tells the camera. “I’m thinking that this is just a dream that someone will wake me up from. I swear I still can’t believe what happened. Nothing makes sense to me.
While her family was safe, others al-Kateab knew were identifiable from the footage she saw as the devastation unfolded. From London she helped circulate photographs of the injured or deceased to help with identification, and using information from those on the ground, was able to help to locate people beneath the rubble. It wasn’t until six months after the earthquakes that she was able to visit Turkey, after securing her visa.
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