Waad al-Kateab on the Turkish-Syrian earthquake documentary “Death Without Mercy”

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On February 6, 2023, after a devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck the Turkish-Syrian border, becoming the worst disaster in the region’s modern history, Syrian director Waad Al-Kateab was in London, worried about her family and friends and feeling helpless.

The activist and director of the Oscar-nominated civil war diary “For Sama,” which went around the world, was unable to reach the affected area because she had fled the regime of Bashar al-Assad. But she immediately contacted people on the ground, including her friends Fadi Al Halabi, a cameraman on the Oscar-winning short film “The White Helmets,” and Fuad Sayed Issa, the founder of the Syrian refugee-run humanitarian organization Violet.

Shortly after, Al-Kateab received a call from renowned producer Sheila Nevins. This led to her making Death Without Mercy, MTV Documentary Films’ powerful observational documentary that premiered at Sheffield DocFest in June. It weaves intimate first-hand footage with TV news, social media, surveillance cameras, drone footage, archive footage and master interviews, following a “you are there” narrative structure that documents the first 10 days after the earthquake that killed over 60,000 people.

Al Kateab chose this means to frame the story because “that’s where we found out everything,” she says diversity in an interview and pointed out that “after the tenth day no one could be alive under the rubble.”

What was your first reaction when you first heard about this devastating earthquake?

Like so many other Syrians around the world, I was shocked. And from the first second I heard what was going on as a filmmaker, I said to myself, “We have to do something about this.” But I felt hopeless and helpless, as I was a refugee living in the UK. I couldn’t go there; I couldn’t do anything other than call and talk to people on the phone, first to my own family, who luckily survived. They were on the streets until they made it to Ankara.

How did you start designing the document?

I immediately started reaching out to people through our activist groups. We tried to help in any way we could. We just shared the whereabouts of some people we knew and pictures of people who were not found and collected donations. I remember one of my first phone calls with Fadi. I’ve known Fadi since 2011 when he was working on The White Helmets. His brother Yaman, who was missing under the rubble, was also a friend of ours. I called him and he was speechless. I just tried to tell him, “Please, be strong, Fadi. You can only do this if you film yourself.” But we didn’t really think about the specifics of making a film. Our first thought was just, let’s document everything we can.

As I understand it, things went to the next level when you got a call from producer Sheila Nevin, right?

Yes, when Sheila Nevins contacted me, she told me she wanted to make an observational film about the earthquake. I thought, “Yeah, this could be an opportunity for them to tell their story.” So I contacted both of them because I knew Fadi had a lot of footage from the first ten days. As for Fouad, I had seen his Instagram. He’s not a filmmaker himself, but he had people around him filming. Also, he had posted so many stories on Instagram, and the survival of his wife and baby was just an incredible story. So I thought, “We can do this!”

When you told the stories of two Syrian families immediately after the earthquake, you obviously had to make quick decisions. Was that difficult?

Honestly, I lived with them second by second, minute by minute. The first few days we couldn’t sleep. And when I thought, “Okay, we’re doing this.” The first thing I said to myself was I’m going to try to put myself in their shoes and think, “What do they know at this point? What’s important to them?” That’s a very important element of the film. Accompanying them through their experience. It’s like a race against time. And that’s what we expressed in the film. That every second counts; every minute counts. That’s why I decided to start the film with the earthquake. And then we go into these characters one by one to understand their position, their circumstances, their situation. I tried to make the audience experience the predicament of each of them. And yes, time was the most critical element of that experience.

My impression is that this film can be seen as a kind of therapy. A way for the protagonists to cope with this great tragedy. Is that a fair assessment of what happened to them?

The first thing they said was, “We wanted to make this film because we wanted to talk about our families. It was just really important to give them space to see who we lost, because 60,000 people, that’s a big number, a huge number. For every one of those people that we lost, there’s a family. There’s someone who is still very affected by that loss. And they just wanted to bring them back to life in a different way, to keep them in good memory.”

The article also shows the extent of the mismanagement. First of all in terms of the construction. And then in terms of the response of the Turkish government and various other institutions. Do you think this can help to reinforce the idea of ​​the incompetence and utter negligence that led to these 60,000 deaths?

I think it’s definitely what they (the film’s protagonists) are looking for, and so am I. It’s a cry for justice, because these people didn’t just die because of a natural disaster. There is corruption; there is a systematic failure on the part of the Turkish government and the UN. We can’t just accept that and live with it. I think it will support other legal work that’s going on in Turkey and also around the world to hold the Turkish government accountable for its failures.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Watch the trailer for “Death Without Mercy” below: