‘Get away from there – run!’ The stunning film about love blossoming amid the carnage of Aleppo
Birds of War is an award-winning docudrama in which its own directors fall in love while reporting the horrors in Syria. They explain why they needed a psychotherapist to complete it
The air is thick with smoke and dust, the ground littered with the twisted remains of burning vehicles. Children scream and sirens blare as activist and videographer Abd Alkader Habak rushes to help the injured after the bombing of an evacuee convoy in Aleppo at the height of Syria’s civil war in 2017. A voice note bubble pops up on Habak’s phone screen. “My bird are you OK?” says BBC journalist Janay Boulos. “Get away from there, run.”
For more than a year, Habak and Boulos have been working to document Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s atrocities against his own people, their connection deepening all the time despite the physical distance. But this exchange represents the moment the pair’s relationship shifts from colleagues to something more. “I don’t want footage,” Boulos says, fear clearly detectable in her voice as she tries to follow things from her desk in London. “I don’t want anything, just please take care. I am here whenever you want to talk.”
Birds of War, out this week in the UK, is the remarkable story of how Lebanese journalist Boulos and Syrian activist Habak found each other against a backdrop of revolution, war and hostile borders, told using 13 years’ worth of archive footage and the couple’s voice notes, selfies, video calls and text messages.
“Originally I wanted to make a documentary about Lebanon and the war and everything that is happening there now,” says Boulos, who, along with Habak, directed the film. “But the more we thought about it, taking in a lot of very complicated history and politics and current events, to make it understandable, we should tell the story how we saw it.”
Smartphones and the internet have made first-person war narratives a 21st-century documentary staple. There have been lots of very good documentary works from the siege of Aleppo, and about the conflict in Syria and its repercussions.
But crucially, despite its title, Birds of War isn’t just about war: it is more broadly a portrait of what it means to be Syrian or Lebanese at this precarious time for the Middle East. It is about what it means to belong – to each other, to a cause, to an ethnic group, to a city, to a nation – and the hopes and fears that accompany these bonds.
Watching Habak and Boulos’s love blossom, and the couple overcome huge odds to be together, is deeply moving. The film won the special jury award for journalistic impact on its premiere at Sundance, also picking up prizes at the Thessaloniki, Seattle and Visions du Réel film festivals.
Shortly after the convoy bombing, with the aid of smugglers, Habak managed to make the dangerous journey out of Syria, across the Turkish border. Boulos flew to visit him and within a few months they decided to get married – something Boulos kept from her disapproving parents until the film premiered earlier this year.
“It was unbelievable for me,” says Habak. “That this person would come from London to see me, a man from a war zone with nothing to offer.” He had left Syria with nothing but his camera, some hard drives and the clothes on his back. The film-maker, who now lives with Boulos in London, originally planned to go back. “I don’t know who I’ll be, without Aleppo to fight for,” he tells her at the time.
Going to meet Habak in Turkey was a “no-brainer”, Boulos says. “It was harmless chatting online – but it shifted to something real. I really cared about him and his safety and felt a lot of guilt. I thought, ‘I am here in London. These people are on the ground risking their lives so I can report the news.’ I spent a lot of nights when he had no internet thinking, ‘Where is he? Is he fine?’ We had started to chat for longer and I realised I really cared for this man when we met in Turkey.”
Birds of War captures this disconcerting element of modern conflict journalism very well. In their first ever exchange of messages, Habak asks Boulos: “Who are you?” In the beginning, he only has her word that she is from the BBC. Meanwhile Boulos, on the hunt for footage from the city, has been passed his number second- or even third-hand. Trust and familiarity grow as the weeks and months go by.
“She talks to me like she sees me. Not as news, not as a story,” Habak muses on screen. Another time, Boulos leaves a voice note: “You are more than a story to me.” The pair begin to use pet names – bird, my bird, little bird – creatures that, unlike our protagonists, can leave frontlines and militarised borders far behind.
Like Boulos, I also covered the siege of Aleppo from afar. Every day, I would check the shifting frontlines and where bombs had dropped via real-time maps, exchanging messages and voice notes with civilians and activists, getting to know a place and its people intimately, but through a screen. The documentary is the best depiction I’ve come across of the powerlessness and guilt that those of us on the other end of a shaky internet connection feel while friends and loved ones in besieged and blockaded places go through hell.
Shortly after Habak joined her in London, Boulos quit the BBC and the pair set up Habak Films, an independent production company focused on telling stories from Lebanon, Syria and the wider region. “It is a struggle when people back home are being killed daily,” Boulos says, referring to the Israel-Hezbollah war. “You want to go back, you want to help, but you realise there’s not enough help you could give in the world. It made me see what my role is. I have the privilege of [being in] London, so let’s be this company that bridges the local voices in Lebanon and Syria to western audiences and news organisations.”
Birds of War is careful not to show too much of the violence and suffering Habak witnessed in Syria, and that the pair have documented since in Lebanon. The film-makers deliberately chose not to feature anything too graphic, or to amplify the sounds of explosions or bombing. The editorial process was helped by input from psychotherapist Rebecca Day, who has a background in documentary work.
“For a long time, I didn’t want to look at my hard drives from Syria,” says Habak who, with Day, came up with they call the “traffic light system”. As Habak spent weeks looking through his material, he labelled it green for footage there would be no problem using, orange for footage that could be distressing, and red for graphic material that didn’t need to be included. “Making this film has been healing,” he says.
Footage of doctors struggling to deal with the influx of injured after bombings in Aleppo is interspersed with a man tending to his roof garden, or friends joking around in their flat. The bleakness of Syria’s dusty, forlorn countryside contrasts with the sparkling blue Mediterranean when Boulos and Habak meet in Turkey and go paragliding – like birds.
“We talk a lot about the responsibilities film-makers have towards their sources and characters,” says Day, “but it’s also important to keep in mind the film-maker’s perspective: what are your needs as a film-maker and as a person? It’s now normal for productions to employ intimacy coordinators. I’d like it to be industry standard for there to be some sort of reflective practice for dealing with traumatic material. It can be a huge burden for film-makers, but they don’t have to carry that all alone.”
The film ends shortly after Habak is unexpectedly able to return home for the first time in years, after the Syrian opposition finally drives Assad from power in a surprise offensive at the end of 2024. But, for all this, the future for Syria and Lebanon remains uncertain. And as Birds of War makes clear, living with uncertainty is a fact of life for people in the film-makers’ homelands, faced with seemingly endless cycles of unrest and violence.
“How long can we keep doing this?” Boulos asks Habak in one message from Beirut. “Just until the wars finish,” he replies.
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