Fleapit revisited:For Sama.

"When the masses are against you, when fear is on every side, and when it seems like you are standing alone, that is when you should stand the tallest. That is when you plant yourself like a mountain, and you do what your heart knows is right. Even if death will be your only reward." - The Heart of Aleppo:A Story of the Syrian Civil War, Ammar Habib.

For Sama is a vital, insightful, painfully truthful, and beautifully shot and narrated document of the destruction of Aleppo during the Syrian Civil War. A war that has now raged for eight years and eight months and resulted in the deaths of approximately half a million people. Or 2% of the entire population of Syria.

Understandably, therefore, it is not a remotely easy watch. I'm not particularly squeamish but even I had to turn away from the screen or put my hand in front of my face on several occasions. While shelling and bombing buildings seen from up high can have a kind of abstract quality, almost allowing us to forget there are people in those buildings, seeing children with their limbs blown off or being sewn into body bags and witnessing a baby being delivered prematurely by caesarean section from the womb of its dead mother and then slapped into life brings home just how violent and destructive war is, and it makes no bones whatsoever about who the real victims of war are.

Nor does it take sides when apportioning guilt. Co-director (with Edward Watts) Waad Al-Khateab begins the film as an idealistic, headstrong young lady who is thrown into a civil war following the brutal reprisals to the Arab Spring enforced by murderous Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Determined to document events to show the outside world and, primarily - and this is what makes for such a neat narrative device - her initially unborn daughter Sama, she decides to film not just the atrocities of war dished out by Assad and, later, his Russian allies, but the small moments of joy and despair on the streets, in the shelters, and in the bombed hospitals of her home town of Aleppo.

There is laughter among the misery. A gallows humour so dark you see no light at the end of the tunnel. There is love too. Not least as Waad and her husband Hamza try to make life as normal as possible for Sama despite clearly flinching as nearby buildings are shelled and the streets are filled with gun fire.

Children, however, remain children. They still play. It's just they play in the remains of blown up buses and sometimes they end up buried beneath the rubble of one of the many barrel bombs dropped on them by their own government. Or, indeed, authorised by Vladimir Putin. Sometimes they choke on the chlorine gas that's been sent by Assad who appears intent on wiping out every single person in the city.

Even those that try to escape or surrender are met with bullets. It appears there is no escape. Waab and her friends sing songs to keep their spirits up, Waad and Hamza's low-key wedding is more touching than any grand wedding could ever be due to the background in which it's played out against, but, behind all these attempts at positivity and trying to lead a normal life there lurks the thought that it might be better to have never been born. It might have been better for their children never to have been born.

Waad and friends bemoan those who have managed to escape the city and make better lives for themselves but, more, they despair how the world has stood by and watched their suffering. Or in the case of Putin who has his eyes on a far larger geopolitical game has decided to increase their suffering. They're pawns in a much larger game to Putin and, as such, they are completely expendable. Vladimir Putin appears incapable of humanity and when there is no humanity eventually there will be inhumanity.

It's to the credit of Waad al-Khateab that this film isn't an hour and half long slog from deep despair to even deeper despair. The joy in the faces of the innocent children, quite unaware that living with sandbags in the windows to the soundtrack of a siege is not normal, brighten the dark mood and, more than anything, the work of Waad's husband Hamza and his colleagues in the only remaining hospital (eight of nine were intentionally targeted and destroyed by Assad to weaken the resolve of those who simply sought their freedom) in their part of Aleppo reminds us that all is not lost for humanity. There are people, many of them, who will continue to do good even in the face of pure evil.

For Sama touches on the fear that Islamist militants may come to Aleppo to 'help' in the fight against Assad. Nobody seems to want that. One murderous enemy is enough. Adding another won't help. It doesn't come to pass and, always, Assad and Putin are the bad guys. Gassing, killing, and orphaning children isn't what the good guys tend to do. Since Putin's intervention it's been almost impossible to see how this war can end in any way other than victory for Assad and further death and destruction for the people of Syria. Waad Al-Khateab's terrifying, bleak, and brutally honest film won't change that but it will, one can only hope, prove a valuable document for those in the future who wish to make sure the same mistakes are not repeated again. But do we learn from history's mistakes? For Sama suggests that, tragically and, for many, fatally, we do not.