It took a text exchange in 2016, between a London-based Lebanese journalist Janay Boulos and a Syrian activist and cinematographer Abd Alkader Habak, to lay the foundation for a unique love story. “Can you find a story and film it?” queried Boulos, one of the many international journalists banned during the Syrian civil war, who depended on local press and activists in Ground Zero to provide footage. “Yes, but who are you? All I know is that you’re from the BBC,” answered Habak from Aleppo. While covering the conflict their professional relationship gradually took a turn for the personal even as their respective countries stayed in turmoil. They were unsure of being able to hold on to each other when everything around them was collapsing.
They have explored their journey to love, as individuals and together, through archival material and raw footage in their debut feature documentary Birds of War. What Boulos describes as “the fragile beauty of human connection”, between a Lebanese Christian and a Syrian Muslim. A bit like our own Gadar and Veer Zaara.
However, the United Kingdom-Syria-Lebanon co-production goes beyond the romance to also dwell on issues of identity, home and belonging, displacement and exile and human rights violations, war crime and resilience of the people.
It's as much about media and journalism and the ethics intrinsic to it. “It’s about the tension between documenting the truth and living it,” says Boulos. Birds of War won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Journalistic Impact on its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. Cinema Express spoke to the filmmaker couple in London.
Excerpts:
Congratulations to both of you for the special jury award. Did it come as a surprise or were you confident of the win?
Boulos: The response to the film was very good. It was very humbling, a lot of people resonated with different aspects of it and with what we were trying to say, but we didn't expect to win because there were ten other films in the competition. It was the first award given in the ceremony. We weren't prepared, we didn't know what to say, what to do.
It was very interesting for us to see how a lot of people related our film to what's happening in the US with ICE and Minneapolis shooting. How can they fight back? What are the tools we have as people? How to document things as they are unfolding so as to make the perpetrators accountable?
It was our first Sundance and we have been very lucky because it's also the festival’s last time in Park City [It moves to Boulder, Colorado next year].
So both of you are in London now or does work take you separate ways?
Habak: We are now between places. Since 2024, when President Bashar al-Assad's regime fell, I've been able to go back to Syria. I'm going now very often, spending more time there and trying to do some more projects from there. We were apart, in our countries, and London became our meeting point. It’s a place where we can take some time to breathe and to think together.
Boulos: We’re working together on another documentary called Until the Buzzing Stops. Habak is directing, and I'm producing it, and we have a couple of other shorts that we're working on. We've had a film with Al Jazeera Witness recently and we are developing some more ideas from Lebanon and Syria. We’re hoping to create a bridge between Lebanon and Syria and the international space in the media in the West through our base in London.
Is the new documentary also about conflict?
B: No, it's about Ali, a Syrian beekeeper in London. It follows his journey as he develops a bee farm in the UK, where he trains refugees in beekeeping and works on preserving the native black honeybee that's endangered. It's about Ali's relationship with the bees, that he says have saved him, because he had been arrested [in Syria] and it was quite traumatic. He came to London after the revolution in Syria. He suffered a lot from PTSD and anxiety and he discovered that the bees help him with his mental health. So he started Bees and Refugees, which is his main project, and we've been following that since then.
There’s a line in the film about you being suspended between two worlds…
H: That is our life. We are living in the UK, we have home in the UK, but at the same time, we have homes in our countries. The homes we also care about, the homes we had to flee from. It's a chance for us to try and help our countries, to go back and try to do something with the people there. We are glad that we have this opportunity to go and come, to build this bridge between our countries and the West.
B: It's also been extremely hard living in London and watching our countries and what's happening there. Every time something happens in Lebanon, I feel there's a need for me to be there, because there is a sense of guilt of being safe in London when my family and my friends and the people I care about are going through such struggles.
For Habak it hasn't been that way until the fall of the regime, so he had to watch things unfold but not being able to be there. His guilt was even worse. This sense of guilt is driving us to want to do more, to be there more, to go back to our roots, and who we are as people, and tell our stories.
Do the political relations between Syria and Lebanon affect personal relationships like yours?
H: I don't think there is a difference between people. It's more a political thing. We are neighbours and in the 90s the Syrian regime took advantage of and got involved in the civil war in Lebanon. So the Lebanese people suffered from our regime. It occupied Lebanon for a long time and was in control of everything, like the Parliament and who’d become the President. It created a barrier between the Lebanese society and the Syrian society, and this barrier created issues between our two peoples. But we are very similar when it comes to food, language. We eat the same food, the names might be different.
Does religion play a role as well?
B: Yes, of course. Habak and I are from different religious backgrounds. He's a Sunni Muslim, and I'm a Christian, and that is also a cultural issue. It's not just a Lebanese-Syrian thing, but, even within Syria. What we try to do with our film is to show that we can be from different religions, political sides, families and backgrounds, but we can still understand each other and communicate with and love each other. Despite the world telling us about what makes us different, at the end of the day we are not. We're humans, we love, we want to be loved. By understanding this we can communicate better and try to bridge what the politics is trying to separate us with.
Why did you feel compelled to tell your own story to the world?
B: The film started as an idea in 2022. I wanted to make a documentary about Lebanon. So, I was filming the revolution from 2019 and then the economic collapse, the elections, my family's experiences through that and my own work there. So, it started as a political film about Lebanon and my role as a journalist. Habak has played a big role in my life, so he was also going to be in this film. We were very grateful to get initial development funding support for the project that allowed us to bring in a bigger team. We started working with Sonia Henrici, our producer, we got Will Hewitt, our editor, and we got Claire Fergson, our consulting editor, and we started to really think, what is the story here? Being from a journalistic background, I focus on the politics, but in cinema and independent filmmaking, it's more the narrative and the personal that really draws people in. So we decided, with our team, that the story will be our love story, and through that we can show the backdrop of what's been happening in Syria and Lebanon. The film won’t be about politics, it won’t be about the war, it'd be about two people, how they fall in love, and their relationship.
You would have had a lot of footage…
H: We had around 20 terabytes of footage. The Syria footage was around 12 terabytes. Janay’s personal archive was almost 7 terabytes. We did additional shooting for the film in 2024 and 2025. Some of the footage from Syria was really bloody and we had to protect our team and worked with a therapist, Rebecca Day’s Film in Mind. I spent two months marking all my footage with the green, amber and red, like traffic lights [as the ones to see and not].
B: Other tools that we relied on were the chats, the voice notes, and the video exchanges that we were having. That added another layer of this modern-day relationship to the film. It gave us a timeline of when we met until today and allowed us to choose what goes into the story.
Did the practice of journalism also drive the film in some way?
B: The film at the moment is fully independent. We don't have any broadcasters involved yet. We wanted to have the freedom to make the film the way we wanted, and we were very grateful to have funders, who gave us grants without giving any editorial input. It has made this a better film. So now if somebody buys it and wants to distribute it, they will take it as it is.
Do you think alike as journalists, in terms of the ethics involved?
B: Habak and I have skills that work together. I have a lot of editorial understanding of what's a good story, how you develop the stories, a lot of production experience with budgets and fundraising. Habak has hands-on experience, he's the cinematographer, he's the director, he's the one who looks for the stories, so I think together we have the production and the creative side covered.
We also feel it's very important to have editors, co-producers and executive producers, because that's how the story gets better. In this film the team helped us distance ourselves from our lived experience, our emotions, and things we were attached to, and judge what serves the film or not.
There’s the crucial moment in the film, when you keep the camera aside and lift a badly injured child for medical help. There must be many such moments, while covering the war, when the photographer in you steps back and the human being takes over…
H: Not just me, all my colleagues who work in Syria. We are not external journalists, we are internal. They are our people. We never talk about it, but whenever we arrive at a scene where help is needed, the first thing we do is run and help. You cannot go to the person asking for help and just turn the camera on and start filming. It’s not as though that moment in the film has been the only one. But it was the first time someone took a picture of me in such a situation. All the journalists from the West were focused on me. It hurt me a lot because people forgot the main thing, that 200 people had died in that incident, half of them children. I feel like I stole the story of those people.
Isn’t it better then to tell your own story yourself, rather than have this constant outsider’s gaze?
B: That’s what we're trying to say with this film. It is the responsibility of the media to hear the story from the people and make sure it reflects their experiences, and not impose judgments or agendas without understanding the culture and the religion and the background. You can't really measure all the people with the same ruler. Everybody is different and you need to listen to the people and understand where they're coming from and tell their story in a genuine and fair way.