“Back in 2016, we didn’t know each other,” Janay Boulos says near the beginning of “Birds of War” (in theaters), the documentary she directed with her husband, Abd Alkader Habak. In 2016, Boulos, who is Lebanese, was a journalist at the BBC. Habak was a Syrian activist in Aleppo.
They connected because, as Boulos explains, the regime of the Syrian president at the time, Bashar al-Assad, had banned journalists “to stop news of his brutality from getting out.” So she and her colleagues relied on footage from activists on the ground, and she ended up texting Habak, asking if he could film stories there. He did — the first was about people growing food on rooftops in Aleppo — and when the work went over well with Boulos’s editors, Habak texted her with a prophetic phrase, though he didn’t know it then: “Hopefully this will be the start of future collaborations between us.”
It was the start of many collaborations and a lot more. Against the backdrop of bombings and violence in Aleppo, the two fell in love. “Birds of War” (so named because they adopted “my bird” and “my little bird” as terms of endearment) tells the story of their romance across the miles, largely through images, voice notes and videos they sent each other, as well as spoken recollections about what was happening in their lives. Frequently, we see their conversations in onscreen text message bubbles, which effectively creates the feeling of their communication.
“Birds of War” is an unusual and affecting love story, because it takes place against protests and uprisings in Habak’s and Boulod’s home countries. Moving across the years, we see them discuss what’s happening and contemplate difficult questions common to people who are displaced or forced into exile, or who are concerned for their families living in dangerous circumstances. Habak was in London with Boulod by the time the events that led to the fall of the Assad regime took place, and he watches them with a mixture of joy and frustration: His dream is coming true, but he’s not there to witness it in person, and that feels like a tremendous loss.
The mixture of joy and grief is threaded throughout “Birds of War,” which makes for gripping viewing not only because of the story it tells but also because Boulod and Habak are such compelling screen presences.
There’s an air of intimacy to the film because it feels as if they’re telling their story to each other, and we’re getting to listen in. That intimacy balances the unthinkable pain they witnessed — a lot of Habak’s footage consists of bombings at close range and people committing heroic acts amid carnage. Habak says that he shoots video of these things in order to “bear witness to the crimes of the regime and the courage of my comrades.” With “Birds of War,” Boulod and Habak have also borne witness to the ways that generosity and care and love outlast even the most heinous of acts.
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