Birds of War review – war journalists find love among the ruins
This documentary tells the story of the long-distance relationship between a BBC correspondent in London and a photographer on the ground in Syria with charm and humanity Politics is to some degree set aside here in favour of matters of the heart; this is a story of romantic love among the ruins. London-based Lebanese journalist Janay Boulos, while working for the BBC’s Arabic service, fell in love from afar in 2016 with Syrian activist and photojournalist Abd Alkader Habak. He, during the Assad regime, was putting his life in danger to supply her with dramatic footage from his home town of Idlib and later Aleppo. Habak was himself to make international headlines in 2017 by getting photographed carrying an injured child to safety. Habak’s gruelling images are interspersed with Boulos’s smartphone footage of her thoughtfully going up and down in the lifts at BBC Broadcasting House as well as home-movie material of her childhood in the seaside Lebanese town of Byblos; we get their tende...