In Aleppo, Khaled and Mahmoud dig through the rubble left behind by bombs dropped from Russian-made planes. They dig to find what is left of humanity in the long and cruel Syrian conflict. “Watch out for torn limbs,” one of them says, matter-of-factly. The two are members of the White Helmets, volunteer teams who rush into bombed areas to save civilians. Neither director of photography Fadi al Halabi nor Syrian director Feras Fayyad seem to have stronger self-preservation instincts. The moments they capture are terrifying, balanced out only by intimate scenes in which the protagonists reflect on the burden they carry, on their minute-by-minute decision to stay in Aleppo, on the nature of normalcy and absurdity of war.