Director Waad Al-Kateab started capturing her personal story without any plan, just filming the protests in Syria on her mobile phone, like so many other activists.

From the beginning, she says she was drawn to capture stories of life and humanity, rather than focus on the death and destruction. If any one scene illustrates that desire in her stunning documentary, FOR SAMA, it is the scene where a baby is Caesarian sectioned from its wounded mother in an against all odds bid to give it breath and heart beat.

Waad’s story begins in 2012 when she was a student studying marketing at Aleppo University. Protests against the brutal dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad reach the university and Waad is one of the first to join. Her camera captures the joy and optimism of those early days.

She meets a young medico in the protests called Hamza and with a group of friends they continue to demand freedom even as the regime resorts to greater and greater violence to crush them, eventually engulfing the city in full-blown war. They lose friends and narrowly escape death themselves at the hand of snipers, airstrikes and barrel bombs, scenes all captured on camera.

In the midst of all this carnage, love blossoms, Hamza and Waad marry, move into their first home and before long Waad is pregnant. Despite the destruction and their despair, Waad and Hamza decide not to flee the city as so many have done, but to stay and continue the fight for freedom. Waad realises that the struggle is no longer only for them, it’s for the future of her daughter. Sama is born on the 1st January 2016, a small semblance and symbol of hope in the chaos.

FOR SAMA ponders deeply on the should I stay or should I go dilemma faced by the citizenry of many war torn countries. To stay and fight against an oppressive regime or seek asylum and safety. Fight or flee? Stay, and face almost certain annihilation? Or surrender, retreat, survive.

Waad lives with Sama’s father, a doctor in the last surviving hospital in rebel-held Aleppo. Surrounded on all sides, bombarded daily by the Syrian regime and Russian air force, Waad fears they may be killed at any moment.

Eventually, they are overwhelmed and forced into exile. Exodus or extinction, there remains no choice.

FOR SAMA is nominated for Best Documentary Feature in this years Academy Awards.