The pair have little in common, but each goes against the grain of how this form is typically used, sacrificing everything else in the pursuit of an important story that simply needs to be told. Apollo 11’s release coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins setting foot on the moon. It gives us real footage of the mission and landing without voice-over, without interviews, with little text overlay. In a similar way to 2014’s Citizenfour, the documentary plays out like fiction, a thriller all the more arresting because of its truth. For Sama, meanwhile, follows five years in Waad and husband Hamza’s lives during the ongoing Syrian Civil War. Made for their newborn daughter, the film focuses on their survival in Aleppo, reluctant to leave as bombs fall around them due to their attachment to their home and because Hamza is the one of the few doctors left in the city.
* * *
Martin Luther King Jr. famously said that “human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable . . . every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.” His outlook was far broader than an individual art form, but to scale it down somewhat: “sacrifice” is at the very centre of documentary filmmaking. Two works released in 2019 recognise this importance beyond self, this appreciation that a more universal agenda must sometimes take priority over style or aesthetic. The films are Todd Douglas Miller’s exhilarating Apollo 11 and the essential For Sama, directed by Waad Al-Kateab and Edward Watts.
The pair have little in common, but each goes against the grain of how this form is typically used, sacrificing everything else in the pursuit of an important story that simply needs to be told. Apollo 11’s release coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins setting foot on the moon. It gives us real footage of the mission and landing without voice-over, without interviews, with little text overlay. In a similar way to 2014’s Citizenfour, the documentary plays out like fiction, a thriller all the more arresting because of its truth. For Sama, meanwhile, follows five years in Waad and husband Hamza’s lives during the ongoing Syrian Civil War. Made for their newborn daughter, the film focuses on their survival in Aleppo, reluctant to leave as bombs fall around them due to their attachment to their home and because Hamza is the one of the few doctors left in the city.
Both films situate the theme of sacrifice in a larger framework of sacrificing conventional modes of documentary storytelling. Apollo 11 introduces its three astronauts via a brief on-screen nametag, followed by positioning a small launch countdown at the foot of the screen, which recurs as well as a day count. Aside from the occasional use of split screen, the frame is left uncluttered and untampered with. The outcome is an effective genre piece whose tactical use of the clock (near hidden but perpetually there) only adds to the creeping tension.
The launch itself resembles the kind of multi-angled, expensive sound design sequence we have become accustomed to in this blockbuster age. Project Control’s previously reassuring voice becomes muffled as it competes with the roar; the noise then subsides as we cut to the beach and applause, not the only time we watch people watching (later a father urges his disinterested son to borrow his binoculars and watch the take-off). The scene is the antithesis of later tension dissolvers such as the control room going for lunch at the end of Day One; or breaking for coffee during Day Four, where the attention to detail is so specific we read the note attached to the kitchen’s coffee tin as the men themselves do. At either end of this spectrum, Miller’s dramatic foundations are realist believability, emotional truth, and fact, even as his anti-documentary style masquerades as fiction.
By nature, documentaries can be the most radical departure from realism. Despite the inherent claim of truth, to cut up footage with interviews, text, and other formal abstractions is to spell out that a viewer is experiencing something artificial – something on a screen, something made. Michael Moore’s activist documentaries would fall apart without the use of interviews, as Alain Resnais’ Nuit et brouillard (1956) would without voice-over and still image. This century has also seen structural fracturing approaches to Capturing the Friedmans (2003), Man on Wire (2008), Blackfish (2013), and 13th (2016). There are exceptions, of course – see Pennebaker’s use of fly-on-the-wall in Don’t Look Back (1967), or the barebones naturalism of Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) – but the general emphasis of the form has been historically edit heavy, often nonlinear, frequently drawing on the components that result in an actively fragmented final product.
Flipping this, there are exceptions in Apollo 11. During Day Five, we get an eight-screen “Go” sequence as the crew prepare to land, and at the seventy-minute mark John Stewart’s “Mother Country” blares loudly. But Miller’s film is otherwise stripped back to just the internal footage, sounds, and voices within the mission. As such, “Project Control” is quickly established as a 3D character in place of an external narrator. His critical voice is the source of pressure tests and leak checks pre-launch and provides regular heart rate updates throughout. The character achieves equal dramatic authority to Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins when it is the source of observations such as “Not since Adam has any human known such solitude as Mike Collins is experiencing during the forty-seven minutes of each lunar revolution when he’s behind the moon, while he waits for his comrades.” This is not a fictional re-creation with unrestricted dramatic access, so Miller cannot cut to Collins; but this only lends the distinctly internal narratorial position more agency.
Another key player is Mission Control. The shared characteristic between him and the other four characters is a human being reduced to a voice by the situation. Yet at the height of the drama, the film and American-history-defining moment goes silent, before coming back in with Armstrong’s immortal lines front and centre, with no trace of background sound. Just as the story is limited to conversation, the minimal narrative space counters the scope of significance. This chamber piece is necessarily hermetic, almost forgetting any existence of a world beyond this cockpit and control room. When Miller does zoom out, we realise just how historically important this small group of individuals are. Nixon’s address emphasises how “For one priceless moment, in the whole history of man, all the people on this earth are truly one.” On behalf of the reported twenty percent of the population watching, he tells Armstrong how their safe return is in everyone’s prayers.
Miller’s film is mimetic, sacrificing any cinematic purpose other than giving this history a screen – just as Armstrong moved the TV camera to get a good panorama of the flag going up, just as Aldrin takes another into the cockpit in order to document everything. Apollo 11’s restored, high-definition footage is incorporated with precision and delicacy, limiting what is constructed around this in the pursuit of impact. After all, this is an account we already know well. This is not the deeper character study Damien Chazelle went for with First Man in 2018. As Miller’s concluding TV broadcast reminds, “this is far more than three men on a voyage to the moon”; but his film is only that. It disregards documentary trend, tradition, and convention in favour of something far simpler, and this is the source of its staying power.
* * *
Conversely, For Sama so rigorously sticks with documentary framework that it is the purest example of one: a provocative call-to-arms that shows everything and filters out almost nothing. Waad Al-Kateab opens with the voice-over that proceeds to carry the film, guiding it, holding it together, illuminating what we are being shown, and attaching the images to a justification for showing them. A still photograph of her is introduced as “me, Waad, five years ago. I was eighteen years old. That year I left my family home to study at Aleppo University.” This establishes one of the conversations at the film’s centre: the one with herself, which directly influences the second and most important: with her baby daughter, giving her film its title.
After talking about her university start – a stark contrast with where her life is by the end of the film, after the five years – Waad discusses how her parents told her to “be careful” there. She says how “they always said I was headstrong, even reckless. I never understood what they meant, until I had a daughter. You.” As she finishes this opening monologue, husband Hamza interrupts and tells her to come because another shell is on the way, but Waad cannot help but keep the camera rolling. She does this throughout, sacrificing her own safety entirely to ensure her story gets told. A later justification for this is “It gives me a reason to be here. It makes the nightmares worthwhile.” We learn of similar reasoning from elsewhere, as a woman at Hamza’s hospital screams “Are you filming? Why are they doing this to us? Film this!” She begs lifeless baby Alaa to wake up in her arms, but he never does.
This happens on several occasions. Fellow civilians recognise how vital it is for someone to film what is happening to them, for anyone to see and hopefully send help. At one point, Waad navigates a sea of bodies covered in blue sheets, people allowing her camera through despite their own frantic attempts to locate loved ones amongst the dead. The common goal across these ninety minutes/five years is survival, only achievable through community and solidarity. Aleppo is responding in the only way it can, resisting the Assad regime’s method of bombing anywhere associated with the opposition by considering everyone on the ground a friend, whose extra pair of hands can help carry the injured to the hospital ward or the dead to their families. Waad and Hamza are at the centre of this, on one occasion desperately locating a five-month-old baby from underneath the rubble, on another carrying the third of two young brothers from their arms to the ward, as urgently as possible. The weight of responsibility is carried into Waad’s recording of the entire thing, never losing face or shutting off her equipment no matter how traumatic the experiences get. Here, the dust-covered, weeping brothers watch as the doctors struggle to resuscitate Mohammad; the camera holds, leaving this horror ingrained before the action eventually cuts elsewhere.
Another important aspect of the film is Waad’s insistence on naming. Just as the structure is defined by more than one temporal episode, names also accumulate, ensuring her camera immortalises more than just the faces attached to them. As a result, the film belongs as much to Alaa or Mohammad as it does to her Sama. This family story is a platform to tell the entire story of Aleppo, itself a platform to tell Syria’s generally. The episodic nonlinearity that often comes with this acts as a pause for breath and reminder of the happier beginning to these five years – we see her and Hamza’s “small but beautiful” wedding; we see her wait for her pregnancy test to turn positive, followed by rehearsals of how to tell her husband in the mirror. Her video camera is her closest ally, the thing binding her family together, but also connecting her with her city and the population sharing its struggle.
We see the family joke about what Sama would say if she could speak, we see them laugh about only wanting to get through the siege to eat a persimmon (and about having no reason to after they find one), we see the beginnings of the political uprising – the fireworks and celebrations that marked the possibility of change and a return to the concept of “home.” This undercurrent of hope is seen but also experienced by the camera, when during Waad and Hamza’s search for their first home the lens is hit with a snowball, or when the attempt at a family home video is derailed by Sama crawling right up to the camera and knocking it off the side. For Sama is defined by the persistence of the personal alongside an inescapably political responsibility. Waad’s camera is caught between these drives, two duties she has to keep reminding herself are inextricably intertwined.
As the crisis escalates and bombs fall closer to the couple’s home, both husband and wife maintain a point of contact to the outside world. Hamza speaks to news channels all over the world, whereas Waad posts video updates online in the hope that circulating their story far enough will bring help. Around them, friends and scores of children die as each day passes. At one point, a child lines up paper cut-outs on his bed, drawings of his “friends” – from behind the camera, Waad asks if the child is okay and he tells her he mostly is, but he does miss them. He does not understand the severity of the situation, a devastating innocence comparable to a group of children discussing bomb types earlier in the film. These scenes are as difficult to watch as the graphic footage of bodies surrounded by pools of blood, or the emergency caesarean carried out on a woman nine months pregnant. Both survive the operation, a miracle that gives Waad “the strength to stay in the struggle.”
Courage in the face of adversity is what keeps these people breathing and Waad’s camera rolling. When the bombs fall one street away, we see civilians locate the shell and smile as they warm their hands on it, but soon the family fear for the worst, that “this is it.” Yet they make it. After six months under siege, there’s a window of time to gather their belongings and leave – as Waad tells us, “saying goodbye is worse than death.” Leaving one home opens the door to another, which must be bigger with Sama’s sibling on the way, again extending the receiving end of For Sama. Unlike documentaries that bury their destination beneath the layers that constitute the form (and unlike Apollo 11, which eradicates these layers), this film says its name on the tin. It is not just for Sama, but also their second baby, for Hamza, and for Waad too. This is an elegy for Aleppo as a whole. It is Syria’s cry for help, but also one for wars raging everywhere.
It might do us all some good to listen. Both documentaries remind us of the values our current climate is missing, values Martin Luther King so importantly gave a voice to. If society has learned anything at the beginning of this new decade, a year on from these films, it is to prioritise community over self, to seek peace instead of conflict, and to look very closely at our own history. Here, to move forwards, we must distinguish between the progress we should commemorate and the horrors we need to be ashamed of.
* * *
All images are screenshots from the films.