The Oscar-Nominated First-Hand Account of an Underground Syrian Hospital Under Siege
The Cave follows Dr Amani Ballour, a Syrian paediatric doctor and manager of an underground hospital comprised of a network of tunnels and caves in besieged Eastern Ghouta on the outskirts of Damascus. We join Ballour and her colleagues as they struggle to deliver life-saving medical care to victims of airstrikes and chemical warfare with increasingly limited resources: ‘we don’t have anaesthetic, but we have music’ surgeon Dr Salim Namour says as we see him prepare for a surgery, propping up his phone playing classical music against a table in the corner.
The opening frame of the film shows the state of the region after five years of steady bombardment under Assad’s ‘starve or submit’ stranglehold: a wide landscape view of blown-out buildings and rubble. ‘There was no safe space,’ Ballour told National Geographic. ‘Imagine being the victim of an airstrike, you’re treated in hospital, and then bombed there too. The hospital was hit many times. I’ve been asked to verify how many strikes. Believe me, I couldn’t count them all.’
It’s an intimate diary of survival and humanity in wartime. Alongside the struggles, normality continues - people eat, sleep, gossip, smoke, dream; nurse Samaher is gently teased for making a bad batch of rice; Ballour turns 30 and the staff throw a surprise party with popcorn. At the same time, Fayyad doesn’t shy away from the impact of the sustained traumatic environment on the staff and patients. As the warplanes rumble overhead and the ground shakes from a shelling, we see Ballour struggle to keep her body’s reaction to the fear under control, putting her hands over her ears, and Samaher come to dread the memory loss she has come to expect after each bombardment.
Dr Amani Ballour is the hospital’s General Manager and Paediatrics Doctor
The Cave follows hot on the heels of For Sama, Waad Al-Kateab’s extraordinary piece of citizen journalism. But where For Sama felt raw and self-authored throughout, having begun as a record of the conflict by Al-Kateab and later becoming a film in collaboration with co-director Edward Watts, The Cave felt much more self-consciously ‘film-like’, with artful cinematography throughout and a dominant score by Matthew Herbert. At times I found the score little distracting; the added drama of emotional cues an unnecessary accompaniment to the power of the situation unfolding on screen. An Arabic-speaking friend of mine said at points he even struggled to make out the words spoken over the background music, needing to rely on the English subtitles.
Nevertheless, it’s a crucial watch, next year marking ten years since the start of the Syrian conflict. Documentaries like The Cave and For Sama, by nature of their intimacy with the subjects, bring you into their characters’ worlds more than a cursory scroll through an article ever could, delivering a much-needed jolt out of news fatigue as the crisis slips from the headlines. The next challenge the film will face is breaking out of the circles of the already sympathetic - but with the recent Oscar nomination, it looks well on its way.
