This powerful, deeply moving documentary follows the courageous medical staff who must treat wounded children as bombs fall around them.
Fera Fayyad, the young Syrian documentarian who made Last Men in Aleppo (and was himself imprisoned and tortured by Bashar al-Assad’s regime), returns with a chilling, shaming film shot over two years in a Syrian hospital in Ghouta, a city besieged by the Syrian government for five years until 2018.
If there’s a crack of hope here, it’s Amani Ballor, a hospital manager and pediatrician in her early 20s. “I know this life is hard. But it’s honest,” she says. Her deep sense of purpose is humbling – it carries her through hellish days treating dozens of bloodied and severely injured children. Her tenderness for her patients is also desperately moving.
The hospital is nicknamed the Cave because of its underground network of tunnels. When the Syrian army and Russian air force bombardment is at its heaviest, patients are evacuated to underground operating rooms and wards for safety. Among Ballor’s colleagues are a humble surgeon named Salim who plays classical concerts on his iPhone during operations (his own hands do a great job of imitating a conductor) and a friendly, cheerful nurse who prepares barrels of rice for the staff.
I suspect that Fayyad has exercised restraint in his editing of the carnage, as carnage after carnage is brought in, but it remains gruesome. Children suffocate after a chemical attack; a child is choked by a piece of rubble; a mother wails over her son’s body.
The footage was shot by three cameramen in the hospital and smuggled out of Syria. Fayyad, who now lives in Denmark, shows the everyday sexism that Ballour encounters in her work. A patient’s husband bluntly tells her that a woman’s place is at home. She is furious: “No one can tell me what to do.” Perhaps Fayyad is talking about the culture of aggressive masculinity. Assad himself is trained as an ophthalmologist, a doctor who bombs hospitals.
To say that The Cave would break someone’s heart seems far-fetched. Like Ballour, he has a goal: to draw the world’s attention to the suffering of the Syrian people.
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