The last time a child was at the front and center of international discourse on the Syrian revolution, it was Alan Kurdi. For some, the inescapable image of his drowned body promised the potential to finally interrupt “Western” paralysis in the face of Syria’s war. For others, the circulating image simply signaled another form of voyeurism disguised as humanitarian concern. Indeed, the discourse around Kurdi followed a long tradition within humanitarianism of framing the child as the ultimate innocent. But Waad al-Kateab and Edward Watts’s 2019 documentary, For Sama, refuses to force the child at the center of its narrative into this trope. Instead, the film reinvests children as part of a network of present and future kinship. Resisting the tendency to position the child as either a harbinger of an endangered humanity or a more utopian guarantee of futurity, the film offers us a different perspective. It positions...
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