Millions of people worldwide saw the June 2014 video, shot during Russian air strikes against the city of Aleppo, in which a Syrian rescue worker reaches into the rubble of a collapsed building, grabs the collar of a buried baby, and pulls it out of the wreckage to safety. But in Feras Fayyad’s moving and suspenseful documentary Last Men in Aleppo, one sees the video through particular eyes, as a little raven-haired girl watches it on a smartphone in her family’s living room. “That’s daddy!” she exclaims to the filmmaker, and then turns to her father. “You got him out! It was you!” Her father, Khaled Omar Harrah, is a member of the Syrian Civil Defense or, more popularly, the White Helmets. As civil war rages, these heroic volunteers hurtle toward the sites of aerial bombardment and risk their lives to recover the survivors, the dead, or even body parts for identification.
Unlike Khaled, Mahmoud has no kids of his own, but he seems no less vulnerable to the suffering of children. Early in the film he responds to an emergency call and succeeds in freeing a little boy from the rubble of a bombed-out building; two babies are pulled from the wreckage, dead, before another boy is found alive. A few days later Fayyad tags along as Mahmoud, a humble and religious young man, pays a visit to the boys’ family to inquire about the children who were lost. In a touching scene, one of the rescued boys crawls into Mahmoud’s lap and asks how he was saved. Embarrassed by the camera, Mahmoud shushes him but finally replies, “By God’s grace. You’re a flower and you must see life.” Driving home, he swears he’ll never repeat the experience. “It felt like we were there to show off,” he tells Fayyad. He redirects his anxiety for himself mainly toward his younger brother, Ahmad, who lives with him in Aleppo (though they’ve told their parents they’re both safe and sound in Turkey).
Directed by Feras Fayyad
