Doc/Fest Audience Award Winner: For Sama

A special, post-festival screening of For Sama, as chosen by our audiences at Sheffield Doc/Fest 2019.

The Audience Award, in memory of Dr Clifford Shaw, is voted for by the Sheffield Doc/Fest audience. It recognises the film that receives the highest audience vote during the festival. This year;s award goes to For Sama, directed by Waad al-Kateab and Edward Watts.

About the film:

Told as a message from a young Syrian mother Waad al-Kateab to her daughter, For Sama traces Waad’s life through five years of the uprising in Aleppo as she falls in love, gets married and gives birth while catastrophic conflict rises around her. An intimate, visceral documentary about the female experience of war, Waad’s camera captures incredible stories of loss, laughter and survival as she wrestles with an impossible choice – whether or not to flee the city to protect her daughter’s life, when leaving means abandoning the struggle for freedom for which she has already sacrificed so much.