Waad Al-Kateab started filming as a “citizen journalist” for Channel 4 News and won awards for her contribution to the series “Inside Aleppo.” (online at http://www.insidealeppo.com/ ) The 21-year old economics student first used a mobile phone, graduated to a camera and occasionally borrowed a drone.

Friends’ amusement at her preoccupation changed when one of them was killed in an air raid. “We knew he was never coming back to this Earth but had this incredible footage of him laughing, working, sad… the life he’d shared was recorded.”

Dedicated to her young daughter, For Sama documents Waad and her husband Hamza’s five year experience of resistance under siege in Aleppo: he as a doctor running a hospital he built from scratch; she trailing him at work before joining his mission and his life. Al-Kateab arrived in the UK, where the family was granted asylum, with over 500 hours of footage.

Together with British documentarist Edward Watts, she spent two years editing the material. The challenge, says Waad, was to achieve a balance between “dark and light, life and death.” Seeing her footage as “evidence,” she was initially resolved to spare the viewer nothing. But an early test screening among friends warned that it would be too difficult to watch.

It was Watts who suggested making Sama the key to structuring the film and using the flashback format – moving between dark and light, with Sama as a lifeline. The islets of love, joy, hope and surreal-seeming normality are as searing as the suffering. Sama means sky in Arabic – a sky, dreams her mother, with no falling bombs.

One of the most profoundly intimate depictions of the Syrian conflict ever put to film … Waad al-Kateab wrestles with her reality with incredible bravery and determination. Clarisse Loughrey, The Independent

The film’s most extraordinary achievement is that, instead of leaving one helpless, it creates resolve. Kate Kellaway, The Observer