[ Dominic Ozanne ] 

In the autumn of 2014 only one westerner travelled to the embattled city of Aleppo in Syria as it was relentlessly bombarded by its own government and as ISIS began to  publicly behead their hostages. That man was leading British trauma surgeon, David Nott, who risked life and limb to spend his six week annual holiday attempting to help the civilian victims of the savage civil war, many of whom were children.

One year earlier the official death toll stood at 100,000, including 10,000 children. Then the UN stopped counting. It simply became too difficult and too dangerous to continue counting the dead. But activists who monitor the situation on the ground believed that by the time Nott left,  the count stood at 300,000.

No western journalists could travel to Aleppo by then. Their employers simply couldn’t insure their lives. Few doctors were prepared to go either. Four hundred medical staff had already been killed, their hospitals specifically targeted and raised to the ground by the Syrian regime.

This film records six terrible weeks in the autumn of 2014 during which Nott worked in make-shift, underground hospitals, attempting to save the lives of Aleppo’s civilians, many of whom were children, who were being relentlessly bombarded by the very government that should have been protecting their lives.