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.
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They met across that vast geographical divide purely by chance, when
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