‘It could have been us’: filming the devastation after

Waad al-Kateab’s documentary Death Without Mercy collects agonising experience from the aftermath of 2023. She reflects on a natural disaster made much worse by politics, and how she is trying to help

Waad al-Kateab has always looked for hope, but when it came to making her latest documentary, Death Without Mercy, the moments were difficult to find. After the nightmarish earthquake shook Turkey and Syria in February 2023, she felt hopeless counting the passing seconds, hours and days from her home in east London as she waited for an emergency visa to visit her family in Gaziantep city, near the Syrian border she crossed years earlier fleeing the Assad regime. “It could have been us,” the film-maker, now a refugee in the UK, tells me with tears in her eyes.

At 32, al-Kateab has a talent for making the devastatingly personal universal. In her debut film, For Sama, she documented life under siege in Aleppo to much acclaim. But when it came to making her third documentary, which follows two Syrian families – her “dear friends” Fadi Al Halabi and Fuad Sayed Issa – over 10 days as they face the devastation wrought by the earthquakes that claimed more than 60,000 lives, the experience was not comparable.