War and love are usually framed as irreconcilable opposites. Yet in Arabic, only a single letter separates the two words.
This fragile linguistic proximity becomes the emotional and political core of Birds of War, the intimate and deeply affecting documentary by London-based Lebanese journalist Janay Boulos and Syrian activist and cameraman Abd Alkader Habak.
Presented at the Sundance Film Festival, where it received the World Documentary Special Jury Award for Journalistic Impact, the film traces a love story that unfolds not despite war, but entirely within it.
Built from 13 years of personal archives — text messages, voice notes, amateur footage, professional reporting, and moments of unbearable silence — Birds of War is both a chronicle of political upheaval and a diary of emotional endurance.
It is a film about borders and proximity, about how revolutions shape private lives, and about what it means to bear witness when the line between journalism and existence collapses.
From assignment to intimacy
The film begins with a deceptively simple exchange.
"Can you find a story and film it?"
"Yes, but who are you? All I know is that you're from the BBC."
At the time, Janay was a journalist in the UK, covering the Syrian civil war from afar. International reporters have been banned from entering Aleppo, forcing news organisations to rely on activists and citizen journalists on the ground.
Abd, already risking his life to document the revolution, becomes one of her most trusted sources.
Their early interactions are strictly professional. Through text messages and voice notes exchanged between London and Aleppo, Janay assigns him stories approved by editorial desks thousands of kilometres away: people growing vegetables on rooftops under siege, doctors and White Helmets struggling to save lives in bombed hospitals, fragments of humanity surviving inside devastation.
Yet gradually, almost imperceptibly, the dynamic shifts. What begins as journalistic mediation becomes recognition.
"She talks to me like she sees me," Abd says at one point.
"Not as news, not as a story." For someone accustomed to being instrumentalised as footage, as proof, as raw material, this recognition is quietly radical.
Parallel revolutions, opposite movements
Set against the backdrop of the Syrian revolution and the Lebanese uprisings between 2011 and 2025, Birds of War constantly draws parallels between the two contexts.
From the outset, Janay frames Syria as a mirror of Lebanon — geographically neighbouring, politically entangled, emotionally inseparable. It is one of the reasons the story affects her so deeply.
Having left Lebanon to escape a form of journalism she felt had become suffocating and politicised, Janay admits she did not want to be "a mouthpiece for political parties."
Yet distance does not bring clarity. Instead, her work begins to feel increasingly hollow.
The film captures this disillusionment through visual contrast: Janay moving up and down elevators, framed by offices and interiors, while Abd runs through streets, crosses checkpoints, and films amid rubble.
Their movements are opposite, but their questions converge.
What does journalism mean today? Who gets to tell stories, and at what cost? Is witnessing still possible when mediation becomes abstraction?
Abd's answer is painfully concrete. "I take risks because I want the world to see what's happening to us," he says. The camera is never far from his hands — sometimes even when he does not consciously reach for it.
Filming becomes an extension of his body, an act inseparable from survival. He does not document as a detached observer; he documents by existing.
Beyond the news frame
The moment that transforms their relationship comes when they realise they are, quite literally, neighbours: one from Syria, the other from Lebanon. The revelation collapses distance. The war is no longer something Janay covers; it inhabits her own history.
From here, Birds of War begins to resemble a love story — though never a conventional one.
There are recognisable stages: the "courtship," jokingly framed as interviews; the exchange of photos; the accumulation of voice notes that become confessions. And yet, the threat of death is never absent.
"I never let anyone get close," Abd admits, "because dying is always possible."
The film refuses mere romanticisation. Just as viewers begin to settle into moments of intimacy, violence erupts back onto the screen.
Bombings interrupt tenderness. News alerts puncture affection. The structure itself mirrors the experience of loving someone in a war zone: always provisional, always interrupted.
The meaning of the birds
The title's central metaphor operates on multiple levels.
"Birds" references both the linguistic roots of the Arabic words for love and war, and the private nicknames the two use for each other — "my bird," "my little bird." It evokes flight, borderlessness, and the desire to move freely across imposed limits.
But birds are also vulnerable. They migrate because they must. They survive by adapting. In this sense, the metaphor becomes political: love, like revolution, is a form of movement, an insistence on life beyond containment.
At one of the film's most devastating moments, Abd reflects: "Sometimes I don't know why I'm still alive. Maybe God doesn't want me. I don't know who I'll be without Aleppo to fight for."
His identity has been forged inside the revolution; exile threatens to dissolve it. Janay, by contrast, has been questioning who she is ever since she met him.
Where he knows himself through struggle, she must return to her origins in order to move forward.
Living with the War
Exile does not end the conflict; it relocates it. "He hasn't left the war behind," Janay observes. "He's brought it with him."
London becomes a refuge, a temporary home where they can finally exist together, but never in full peace. Silence feels unfamiliar. Safety feels fragile.
The film repeatedly asks what belonging means when home is unstable. Is family a place, a cause, a shared struggle? Can roots be put down without betrayal?
"It's difficult to put down roots," Janay reflects, "but it's even harder not to."
The question "How long can we keep doing this?" echoes throughout the film. The answer is as stark as it is hopeful: "Just until the wars finish."
Reclaiming journalism as life
A pivotal shift occurs in 2020, during the Lebanese revolution.
Janay picks up the camera herself. She begins filming the streets, the protests, the violence — doing what Abd has done for years.
Soon after, she quits the BBC. "I know what I should be doing," she says. And, implicitly, with whom she should be doing it.
This is not a rejection of journalism, but a reclamation of it. Birds of War argues that reporting cannot be reduced to desk-bound narration or editorial distance.
True witnessing requires presence, vulnerability, and accountability. Revolution, the film suggests, is not something you merely document. It is something you live.
A scrapbook of survival
Formally, Birds of War resembles a non-canonical scrapbook — a collage of life and history unfolding in real time. Moments of laughter and intimacy sit beside unbearable footage of bombings and loss.
Yet the film never collapses into despair.
Hope persists in fragments: in Abd's friends, in doctors and White Helmets saving lives, in families slowly learning to accept what once seemed unthinkable, including a cross-border marriage born of war.
In the end, Birds of War is neither purely a love story nor strictly a political documentary. It is something rarer: a testament to the possibility of connection amid systemic violence, and to the idea that love itself can be a form of resistance.
Against a present still shaped by walls, borders, and ongoing wars, Janay and Abd offer an alternative grammar — one in which love and war are separated by just a letter, and in which choosing love becomes a radical act.
Agnese Albertini is a film journalist and critic for Best Movie, both its online magazine and Italy's most widely read monthly print publication on cinema and entertainment, as well as cinefilos.it and cinemaserietv.it. Based between Italy and Dubai, she regularly covers major international film festivals, including Cannes, Venice, and Biografilm, with a focus on reviews, features, and cultural reporting
Follow her on Instagram: @agnesealbertini