I have rarely seen a documentary film as powerful as For Sama. The viewer is transported into the Syrian city of Aleppo to experience the very nasty civil war at first hand.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Feb 8, 2020

[A] dynamic and poignantly personal account of a city's systematic destruction.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 5, 2020

They display a striking buoyancy, which the film captures in moving detail -- there is laughter, there is comradeship, there is life even in the face of horror.

| Nov 15, 2019

Even when it's drenched in grief, "For Sama" contains the seeds of hope.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 8, 2019

This is devastating. So hard to watch, so heartbreaking, and so inspiring.

| Oct 2, 2019

t might be overstretching it to say the film ends with a message of hope. But it does, at least, speak to the human capacity for survival.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 20, 2019

You leave understanding why for Al-Kateab the past is something she wants to live with every day.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 16, 2019

For Sama interweaves its very personal narrative with a broader political story, finding the bigger picture in the tiniest of details.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 15, 2019

For Sama is one of the most profoundly intimate depictions of the Syrian conflict ever put to film.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 14, 2019

Mostly, though, this is a film, skilfully pulled together by Edward Watts, the British co-director, that unfolds as a guttural cry of despair and an incendiary plea for justice. See it. But don't take popcorn.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 13, 2019

For Sama... is acutely personal and intimately authored.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 12, 2019

Profoundly moving and unignorable, whether as proof of Assad's barbarism, or the unfailing ability of this world - and its most engaged cinema - to break your heart and sear your soul.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 12, 2019

This harrowing film restores our responsiveness.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 11, 2019

For Sama powerfully mixes the personal and the political to thought-provoking, emotional ends. The result is one of the best documentaries of 2019.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 11, 2019

One of the most remarkable and affecting war docs of all time.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 10, 2019

Must be seen to be believed. Waad Al-Kateab is your new hero.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 10, 2019

One of the most intimate and stirring documentaries about war in the 21st century, and a plea to the free nations of the world to act.

| Aug 28, 2019

al- Kateab's commitment to bearing witness with her camera was as strong as her husband's to the wounded and dying...

| Aug 27, 2019

"Places are about their people," Hamza insists, and even as For Sama sinks into an uncertain limbo during its final third...this utterly essential documentary never fails to illustrate what he means by that.

| Original Score: B+ | Jul 26, 2019

Watching the film, I felt it would be an act of cowardice to look away from what Waad was showing us. I trusted that this wasn't just propaganda - that I was being asked by a mother to bear witness.

| Jul 26, 2019