Abd Alkader Habak and Janay Boulos in Birds of War

Hot Docs ’26: Birds of War

Posted in2026, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Lebanon, Syria, UK

***/****
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.

Hot Docs ’19: For Sama

Posted in2019, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2019, Syria, UK

For_Sama_1

***½/****
directed by Waad al-Kateab, Edward Watts

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 25-May 5, 2019 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda Born out of student journalist Waad al-Kateab's first-person video diary of the early days of the uprising against the Assad regime in Aleppo, For Sama is a startling document of how everything from parenting to the concept of home to the myriad forms of political resistance available to the young and idealistic is rendered uncanny by life under wartime. Co-directed by al-Kateab and Edward Watts, the film is both a daring work of frontline reportage and an appropriately anxious time-capsule message left to be discovered at some later date by al-Kateab's daughter, who is born during the conflict and whose future is ever-threatened by the precarious political status of her parents in the besieged city.