Last Men in Aleppo

[The Ultimate Nullifier]

www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/last-men-aleppo-966701

'Last Men in Aleppo': Film Review | Sundance 2017

Syrian filmmaker Feras Fayyad directed this film about the siege of Aleppo with Danish co-director and editor Steen Johannessen.
In case Gary “What Is Aleppo?” Johnson is still wondering why it is important that (potential) world leaders and the world at large pay attention to what is happening in the city, the documentary Last Men in Aleppo would be a good starting point. Directed by Syrian filmmaker Feras Fayyad and co-directed and co-edited by Danish cutter Steen Johannessen, this harrowingly immediate feature follows two Syrian members of the White Helmets, the organization that goes in after each bombing from the air to try and rescue victims from under the resulting rubble and ruins.

Frequently heartbreaking and hard to watch — “Watch out for torn limbs,” one of the protagonists tells his colleagues matter-of-factly at one point — the film demands to be reckoned with as a testament to the selflessness and courage of these literal life savers, though the constant preference for a purely human approach over even basic contextual information might rub some viewers the wrong way.

The White Helmets have been receiving quite some attention lately, with Orlando von Einsiedel’s short Netflix documentary about them shortlisted for an Oscar and with George Clooney reportedly working on a feature version. This could possibly help turn this impressively shot film into possibly the first Syria-themed documentary since the essential Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait from 2014 to have a shot at theatrical distribution in several territories.

Fayyad’s film was shot between the fall of 2015 and the fall of 2016, while barrel bombs from Russian planes rained on Aleppo, restricting the movement of the volunteers and about 250,000 civilians (left from a population of over 2 million) to an ever-smaller part of the city. Whenever a bomb reduces a building to ruins, the White Helmets try to arrive as quickly as possible to see if there might human victims that need to be rescued. At the start of the film, Fayyad and co-director Johannessen give only the barest of outlines about the conflict and even less information about the White Helmets themselves, omitting, for example, that the organization is financed from abroad and mostly ignoring its political dimensions.

Instead, the documentary focuses on the grueling day-to-day of two White Helmet workers. Khaled and Mahmoud are both around 30 and they tirelessly hurry to wherever a new bomb has hit and destroyed a building, potentially trapping living souls underneath the rubble. With danger for their own lives, they dig and move tons of debris until they can either reach survivors or recuperate the corpses of those that have died. It is, of course, a thankless task in which a moment of ecstasy over finding a living child can tip over into tragedy mere seconds later when their mother or one of their siblings turns out to be dead.

Johannessen and co-editor Michael Bauer carefully modulate the contrasts of the men’s daily highs and lows in the film’s first half, with grave moments alternating with light banter between the men or moments of Khaled with his two young daughters (his wife is conspicuous by her absence). There is a sense that they try to continue life as normal for as much as possible, buying goldfish — earlier spied in the initially rather enigmatic opening sequence — for a fountain or taking advantage of a cease-fire to let the children play outside. The question of whether they should leave is constantly on Khaled’s mind, as ever more buildings are razed to the ground, people die and the unmentioned question arises of what and who is left to stay behind for?

Similarly, Mahmoud struggles with more existential questions as well as those arising from his job. After a visit to family of whom he saved a son, he feels guilty because it felt like he was “showing off”. But it is impossible to reconcile this with an earlier image of the boy, with his hair still missing where he had head wounds, as he sat with Mahmoud’s arm around him, quizzing him about his rescue. Mahmoud’s warm embrace and kind gestures suggest exactly why he digs into each new pile of rubble, hoping to rescue another child like that kid.

Mahmoud also worries about his younger brother Ahmed, who wants to help him, and about his parents, who think the siblings are working in Turkey. In one of the film’s most intense scenes, the brothers are almost hit by a missile and then shot at just after having arrived at a car wrecked by a missile. They were there to get the corpses out of the burning vehicle but for wanting to look after the dead, they almost ended up dead themselves.

Director of photography Fadi al Halabi had a crew of several cameramen who followed Khaled and Mahmoud over the course of a year. Their images are often stunning, not only for what they show but also how they showcase it. Despite the fact they are working in a war zone, there is practically none of the bad-quality shaky-cam footage that we’ve come to expect from those places. Instead, many of the shots have a kind of incongruous and surreal beauty about them, imbuing the film with a certain majesty. And except for a few grainier nighttime and interior sequences, the images are of exceptional clarity.

The editing in the film’s second half is slightly baggier than necessary, while Karsten Fundal’s heavy and heterogeneous score is often less a harmonizing factor than a distraction. The final sequences also feel a little too much like a calculated, fiction-type arrangement of the available footage. Still, there is no denying the cumulative power of the material, in large part due the protagonists’ endless reservoirs of humanity, dignity and selflessness in the face of one of the world’s worst biggest current and most incomprehensible tragedies. Light on background and contextual facts, Last Men in Aleppo speaks very loudly from the heart.

Production companies: Larm Film, Aleppo Media Center, Kloos & Co Medien
Directors: Feras Fayyad, Steen Johannessen
Producers: Soren Steen Jespersen, Kareem Abeed
Director of photography: Fadi al Halabi
Editors: Steen Johannessen, Michael Bauer
Music: Karsten Fundal
Sales: DRSales

No rating, 104 minutes

[The Ultimate Nullifier]

variety.com/2017/film/reviews/last-men-in-aleppo-review-1201978236/

Film Review: ‘Last Men in Aleppo’

Amid a recent influx of Syria-themed docs, Feras Fayyad's Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner stands out for its rich craft and practical candor.

When a devastating international crisis brings with it an inevitable surfeit of topical documentaries on the subject, audiences can be overwhelmed to the point of inactivity. No one outside the festival circuit has either the inclination or the constitution to watch them all, while the options can look indistinguishably downbeat even to the conscientious. The ongoing Syrian Civil War has been abundantly covered on screen of late — with three Syria-related feature docs premiering at Sundance this year alone. But a standout candidate for crossover distribution may have emerged in “Last Men in Aleppo.” Feras Fayyad’s viscerally immediate, exquisitely realized portrait of the Syrian Civil Defense’s “White Helmet” volunteers at the frontline of the conflict in Syria’s decimated capital may not be the most comprehensively explanatory or analytical film yet made on the war, but it’s the one that provides viewers with the most sensorily vivid and empathetic sense yet of how it feels to live (and die) through the carnage.

Unsurprisingly awarded the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, Fayyad’s film should have no trouble parlaying its Park City heat into extensive further festival play and acclaim, as well as offers from top documentary-specific distributors. Multi-platform release strategies are likely, aiming to engage audiences wary of venturing to theaters for such a heart-sinking chronicle. That said, the cinema is where “Last Men in Aleppo” firmly belongs. Together with co-director and editor Steen Johannessen, Fayyad brings a rigorous sense of craft and shock-and-awe scale to the film’s impressions of destruction, without impeding its anxious, on-the-hoof spontaneity. Any viewers coming to this after seeing “The White Helmets,” Netflix’s commendable, Oscar-nominated short on the SCD, needn’t fear seeing the same film again at greater length: This is a less cleanly packaged project, patient and nuanced in developing its individual human subjects and emotional stakes.

If anything, the Netflix film could serve as a useful primer for “Last Men in Aleppo,” which assumes a fair bit of knowledge on the audience’s part regarding who the White Helmets are and the circumstances that require them. Beginning with a rather cryptic, counterintuitive opening credit sequence featuring serenely floating goldfish — given poignant context later in the film — Fayyad often requires viewers to catch up with his most arresting visions, furnishing them with minimal journalistic detail. By leading with sheer, horrifying sensation as explosions shake the camera and buildings are reduced to dust before our very eyes, the film communicates the most universal human losses of the Syrian conflict. After all, finer political complexities aren’t the first thing on one’s mind when the fight is simply to stay alive and standing; Fayyad presents a warzone so exhausted and smoke-swathed for its participants that its very cause has disappeared amid the rubble.

With the conditions and textures of its environment established, however, the film is simple and pragmatic in its focus. Though it introduces and tracks a number of individual White Helmet workers, also giving a strong, moving sense of their strength as a collective, two emerge as particularly charismatic principals. Jovial family man Khaled Harah is the chief rallier of the group, attempting to keep his fellow volunteers motivated and hopeful as they negotiate human damage and debris that accumulates faster than they can sift through it, as bombs practically blur into background noise. His doughtiness, however, masks his own crisis of confidence, with his instincts caught between loyal service to his home city and the safeguarding of his wife and two daughters. “Something inside me tells me to leave,” he says to camera — though he knows that no one is likely to replace him on the rescue team if he does.

His more solemn partner Mahmoud, meanwhile, has put his philosophy studies on indefinite hold to join the White Helmets — grappling instead with weighty matters of ethics and accountability while out in the field, and struggling with the perception of heroism while other distraught citizens have the soul ripped out of them. “Last Men in Aleppo” follows his lead by refusing to sentimentalize their mission, sometimes to the point of brutal anticlimax. In one crushing scene, the extraction of a baby’s corpse in the wreckage and the discovery of its living but dumbfounded mother occur only seconds apart. There’s no triumph to be found in this job, only degrees of tragedy. A ghoulish sensibility even prevails on occasion, as workers try to discern the identity of a single severed foot, not long after they’re brusquely instructed to watch out for detached limbs in the fray.

Like its human subjects, the film is at pains to avoid self-congratulation as it strenuously puts this all to screen: The tone throughout is one of no-nonsense candor, not elevated martyrdom. Even so, it can hardly escape viewers’ notice that this frequently astonishing first-hand footage — shot over the course of a year between September 2015 and the fall of 2016 — has been obtained at immense risk to the lives of the filmmakers. That makes the care with which it has been composed and assembled all the more remarkable.

Even when caught directly in the crossfire, director of photography Fadi al Halabi and his crew of cameramen shoot with consistent poise and precision, keeping a constant eye out for human activity at the very edges of a scene; there’s even a perverse beauty at play in various dazzlingly lit images of pyrotechnic destruction and raging flames. Johannessen and co-editor Michael Bauer organize the footage with a keen sense of passing time, without imposing too much of a narrative structure on events that feel, to those affected, shapelessly futile. If a few too many of the film’s consecutive final scenes seem to draw to an ending — before a gut-wrencher of a closing chyron — one can understand the reluctance to let any of this material go spare.

Film Review: 'Last Men in Aleppo'
Reviewed at Sundance Film Festival (World Cinema Documentary Competition), Jan. 23, 2017. Running time: 104 MIN.
Production
(Documentary — Denmark-Syria) A LARM Film, Aleppo Media Center presentation in association with Kloos & Co Medien. (International sales: DR Sales, Copenhagen.) Produced by Søren Steen Jespersen, Kareem Abeed. Co-producer, Stefan Kloos.
Crew
Directed by Feras Fayyard. Co-director, Steen Johannessen. Camera (color, widescreen), Fadi al Halabi. Editors, Johannessen, Michael Bauer.