Like a flower that somehow emerges through concrete, love can blossom even in a space of unfathomable violence.
That is the hopeful theme of Birds of War, the documentary directed by Janay Boulous and Abd Alkader Habak that just won four awards at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival in Greece after earning a Special Jury Award at Sundance in January. The film tells the story of how an unlikely romance developed between Boulos, a native of Lebanon, and Syrian Habak, against a backdrop of war.
“Our film began in 2016 when I was in Aleppo working as a cameraman,” Habak explains in a video he and Boulos made for Sundance before their world premiere there. “And I was working as a journalist in London at the BBC,” Boulos notes.
They met across that vast geographical divide purely by chance, when Boulos in her capacity at the BBC needed footage documenting the hideous civil war in Syria. Sometimes it might be a request for freelancer Habak to shoot a “lighter” story – for instance, a man tending the green sprouts of a rooftop garden even as destruction rained around him. Sometimes it was much more intense footage of Syrian government and Russian forces dropping bombs and firing missiles into civilian areas with devastating consequences.
“Our film explores the tension between documenting truth and living it, using raw footage and deeply personal archives,” Boulos says in that Sundance video. “Ours is a story of resilience and displacement and the fragile beauty of human connection.”
The documentary in its original conception was meant to follow a different path.
“I wanted to make a film about Lebanon as a journalist,” Boulos tells Deadline in an interview at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen, which Boulos is attending as an invited guest. “I was focusing on the political in my head, and I wanted to tell the political story.”
But then the narrative began to evolve. “I wanted to tell the political story, but that’s not the way feature documentaries are presented. They focus more on the human, and that’s what’s drawing you in, is actually the human emotion. So, I had to take off my journalist hat and start to think with my partner and our team on what is really the story,” Boulos recalls. “We got Will [Hewitt], our editor who was working with us from the beginning, and we got Claire Ferguson to join us as a consulting editor. And with her, we decided what is this story? It is our love story. And through that we could see what’s happening in Lebanon, what was happening in Syria.”
The archive of material Habak shot over years offers an intimate and visceral experience of life on the ground – the unsteady ground shaken by constant aerial assaults. The view from neighboring Lebanon comes through Boulos’s visits there to see her parents, who have stoically lived through decades of catastrophe – successive Israeli invasions going back to the 1970s, Syrian intervention and occupation in Lebanon also going back to the 1970s under Syrian strongman Hafez al-Assad, father of future dictator Bashar as-Assad.
In the film, Boulos admits concealing from her parents that she has become involved with a Syrian, largely because she and Habak aren’t co-religionists: he’s Muslim and she’s a Lebanese Christian. Tribalism along sectarian lines has long been a reality in both Lebanon and Syria, Boulos notes.
“Habak and I are from neighboring countries. We speak the same language, we eat the same food, we have the same music, we have the same culture, but we are separated by religion, we are separated by political aspects, and we are separated by hate and racism that has been put on Lebanese and Syrians because of politics, because of meddling, Syrian meddling in Lebanon. And the two countries are connected, whether we like it or not,” she tells Deadline. “And this is still happening in Lebanon at the moment. We are being divided by Christian, by Shia, by Sunni. Political parties in Lebanon are all based on religion. There’s not a single secular active political party. So, if you are a Christian Maronite, you’re this party, if you’re a Shia, you’re this, if you’re a Sunni, [you’re that]. It’s kind of like politics and religion is intertwined. And this is how we are being separated and we continue to be separated. And sadly, if you take a wider look at the region and you see Iran and you see the Gulf, that’s a Sunni-Shia fight that’s again being fueled by hate and fueled by segregation. And if you take that a step further, that [division] goes back to the days of when Islam started.”
Boulos adds, “This is how we’re being controlled and people are all the same, but when people are poor, when there’s not a functioning government protecting you, when you don’t have electricity or you don’t have gas and you don’t have water, you don’t have your basic life support, you become weakened and all you have is religion.”
Our conversation in Copenhagen took place roughly a day before Israel expanded its war in Lebanon. On Wednesday, Israeli strikes destroyed two bridges over the Litani River, “linking southern Lebanon with the rest of the country,” the BBC reports. “Israeli strikes hit multiple locations in Beirut, killing at least 12 people and wounding 27, Lebanese authorities said. The escalation marks a widening of Israeli strikes beyond the southern suburbs into central Beirut.”
Nearly a thousand Lebanese, including 111 children, have been killed by Israeli attacks since March 2 when Israel renewed its campaign against the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia.
“It’s painful to see. It’s scary because I know that in a way, sadly, the South of Lebanon has always been under pressure of [Israeli] occupation and the talk about the Litani River is being where they want to displace people because there is an intention to occupy,” Boulos says. “And we’ve seen what occupation did in the West Bank and how slowly the [Israeli] settlements took over. That’s not legitimate.”
This latest violence adds to the “trauma from what I’ve been through and what my family’s been through. It’s trauma that I’ve been carrying through generations of the South of Lebanon,” Boulos comments. “It’s only going to create more trauma. It’s only going to create more killings, more hate, more division, more separation. It’s going to weaken the country more.”
Next door in Syria, massacres of Alawite minorities took place last year in the wake of the Bashar al-Assad’s ouster — killings allegedly committed by forces aligned with the new government. But there’s a measure of hope that the country can emerge from the era of brutality and repression of the Assad regimes – of Hafez and Bashar – creating a more stable future.
Making the documentary, too, represents an inherent act of hope – showing the possibility of love in a landscape of political and sectarian violence.
Sharing Birds of Love with the world “is what I feel helps me with my guilt of not being in Lebanon, of being privileged to travel the world,” Boulos says. “And I want to use this time to talk to people, to share this story, to tell them what we’re going through and what we’ve been through, and to engage with the audience as much as possible.”
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