***/****
directed by Janay Boulos & Abd Alkader Habak
Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 23 to May 3, 2026. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.
by Bill Chambers It’s 2016. Aleppo is under siege. Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has banned journalists to stymie coverage of his atrocities, so BBC reporter Janay Boulos, a London transplant from Lebanon, contacts Syrian videographer Abd Alkader, a.k.a. Habak, for boots-on-the-ground footage. The fomenting Syrian revolution inspired Habak to pick up a camera and document what he was seeing in the early 2010s. Branded an activist, he fled his humble village in Idlib for the ostensible security of Aleppo, which soon came under attack from Russian and Syrian forces. Habak resumed filming. Janay hears a rumour that Aleppo residents are growing food on their rooftops. Habak gets her video proving it, and the BBC posts it on their website. Eventually, Eastern Aleppo is evacuated. Habak returns to Idlib, another war zone. He reaches out to Janay, pitching her ideas for other human interest stories that highlight Syrian resilience.
They grow closer via text. Habak refers to himself as a free bird. Janay feels like one, too. They start addressing each other as “birds” (“my bird,” “my little bird”); there’s a bittersweetness to it that shines through the text bubbles. Free birds are also alone. Janay grew up in Lebanon with parents who lived through multiple terror campaigns. She graduated with a degree in journalism, but in Lebanon, as in 2026 America, journalists are reduced to mouthpieces for the government. Janay relocated to London, where she lives with her cat, Fashfash. She makes a good living but feels like an impostor reporting on things like an exhibit of the Queen’s crap at Buckingham Palace. “In Aleppo,” she says in voiceover, “each day could be your last. For me, it’s just another day at work, with paid holidays.” She identifies a wish to return home and express her political consciousness more radically as jealousy, but the images of her clicking on Habak’s selfies suggest something else. I think Janay fears she doesn’t have his respect. And obviously, she’s falling in love.
When Habak saves a child during a skirmish, a photo of his heroism goes internationally viral, putting a bullseye on his back. He escapes into Turkey, where he and Janay arrange to meet. Before you know it, they’re scuba-diving together, windsailing, getting blood tests, getting married. Suddenly, Janay’s life of relative privilege offers salvation. Boulos and Habak are a new breed of digital couple whose relationship is so scrupulously archived that it can be forensically retraced from courtship to matrimony–and indeed it is in their co-directed Birds of War, a collage film assembled from 13 years’ worth of videos and texts. Here, two complementary narratives gradually, artfully, become one, with alternating voiceovers lending further subjectivity to the dual points of view–though they’re hardly needed to make sense of the structure or to give narrative dimension to the often harrowing imagery, which tends to speak for itself. The first half of Birds of War recaps an unlikely meet-cute; the second, a shotgun marriage. Their relationship, the by-product of global unrest and cellular technology, is at once the stuff of Russian literature and a uniquely twenty-first-century specimen.
But when the honeymoon’s over, Janay’s London digs take on the symbolic meaning of a gilded cage (Habak bitterly watches the statue of Assad topple on TV in 2024, smothering his FOMO in booze and cigarettes), and the film itself begins to suffer from the feeling that it’s been domesticated. Somehow, pointing a lens at each other finds Habak and Janay less forthcoming than they are in those early scenes where the camera acts as a mirror. Maybe they’re just trying to maintain harmony or preserve their romanticized image of each other, but this newfound coyness even seems to influence the editing by making it cagier. Habak stands outside the NHS at one point, worrying about confiding in strange doctors who may or may not understand what he’s going through, yet whatever he is going through (PTSD is my assumption), Janay doesn’t press him on it, and it never comes up again. We don’t get to see how COVID protocols impact our free birds, either. Indeed, for all intents and purposes, COVID never happened in their world, something that strikes a peculiar note of deceit in a film this politically engaged.
Still, Birds of War remains compelling throughout because the suspense transfers from Habak and his dangerous lifestyle to the marriage and its chances of survival, and the shared POV approach almost incidentally charts fresh territory for some contemporary documentary staples (content creation, perpetual war, modern love, etc.) while being innovative in and of itself. An objective documentarian might’ve poked the proverbial bear a little more, but, as in a final scene set in Beirut with Janay’s Christian mother biting her tongue long enough to pick lemons for her daughter’s Muslim husband while Israeli planes hover ominously overhead, there is no shortage of meaning between the lines.
