‘Birds of War’: A Love Story Told in Texts From Besieged Aleppo

The documentary “Birds of War,” now in theaters, opens with a date that anchors everything: 2016, the year its two directors didn’t yet know each other. Janay Boulos, who is Lebanese, was a journalist at the BBC. Abd Alkader Habak, her future husband and co-director, was a Syrian activist in Aleppo.

The film explains how they met with unusual clarity. “Back in 2016, we didn’t know each other,” Boulos says near its beginning. The regime of then-Syrian president Bashar al-Assad had banned journalists, as she puts it, “to stop news of his brutality from getting out.” So Boulos and her colleagues relied on footage from activists on the ground. She ended up texting Habak to ask if he could film stories there.

He could, and he did. His first assignment covered people growing food on rooftops in Aleppo. When the work went over well with Boulos’s editors, Habak texted her a phrase that turned out to be prophetic, though he couldn’t have known it at the time: “Hopefully this will be the start of future collaborations between us.”

What grew out of a work text?

Plenty. Against the backdrop of bombings and violence in Aleppo, the two fell in love. “Birds of War” — named for the terms of endearment they adopted for each other, “my bird” and “my little bird” — tells the story of their long-distance romance largely through the material they actually exchanged: images, voice notes and videos, plus spoken recollections about what was happening in their lives.

The film’s most distinctive formal choice is its use of onscreen text message bubbles. We frequently see their conversations rendered as texts, which effectively recreates the texture of how they communicated across the miles. It’s a device that turns a war documentary into something closer to an intimate correspondence — the medium itself carries the relationship.

Why the setup matters

The mechanism here is worth spelling out. Assad’s press ban didn’t just restrict reporting; it forced international outlets into dependency on local activists with cameras. That professional dependency — a Beirut-based journalist needing eyes in Aleppo — is the literal precondition for this love story. Remove the ban, and the first text never gets sent.

The film doesn’t pretend the backdrop was incidental, either. The rooftop-gardens story that launched their collaboration is itself a snapshot of civilian life persisting under siege, and the footage Habak shot sits alongside the couple’s personal exchanges as part of the same archive.

What does this change for documentary form? “Birds of War” joins a growing body of films built from participants’ own messages and video — evidence that the war documentary’s raw material is now often the phone, not the news crew. For Boulos and Habak, that material doubles as a record of how two people found each other while a city came apart. Their 2016 “future collaborations” line turned out to undersell it.