Aleppo was Syria's largest city and its commercial hub before the civil war reached it two years before filming. VICE filmmaker Medyan Dairieh follows the volunteers of Aleppo's Civil Defense, the group later known as the White Helmets, as they race to bombing sites to pull survivors from collapsed buildings after government airstrikes. The camera stays close to the wreckage and the rescues rather than to any studio analysis: barrel bombs, crude explosives dropped from aircraft onto rebel-held neighborhoods, and the volunteers who show up first, often before any other help arrives. By this point roughly 70 percent of the population has fled, and the footage shows what is left, gutted apartment blocks, empty streets, families still sheltering in place. Dairieh embeds directly with the rescue teams rather than narrating from a distance, so the film's pace is the pace of their callouts. The result is a street-level record of a city under siege and the civilians who decided to become its emergency service.