The Cave

The Cave is an astonishing documentary that takes its viewers not just inside the Syrian War, but underneath it as well. A companion piece to director Feras Fayyad’s Oscar-nominated Last Men in Aleppo, the film tells the story of a subterranean network of tunnels that function as a hospital, where the besieged residents of war-torn Al-Ghouta, a town near Damascus, come for relatively safe medical care. Most are greeted by Dr. Amani Ballour, a female doctor in her late 20s, who remains undaunted by the, at-times, rampant sexism around her to serve as the hospital’s managing physician. The hospital endures everything from the constant fear of daily bombing raids to the heartbreak of children suffocating in war-crime chemical attacks. The images are harrowing, as they need to be, to implore help for these seemingly forgotten victims. For telling us an extraordinary story of resilience and hope, and of remarkable courage on the part of the doctors and of the filmmakers, The Cave wins a well-deserved Peabody.