On a spring afternoon in 2017, Abd Alkader Habak was running through smoke and fire toward a bombed convoy of evacuees on the outskirts of Aleppo when his phone buzzed. "My bird, are you OK?" the message read, sent from a BBC desk in London by Lebanese journalist Janay Boulos. "Get away from there, run.

" It was a small, digital cry of fear — the kind that smartphones have made newly possible in wartime — and it carried, buried inside it, something that neither of them had yet named. That moment of terror and tenderness forms the emotional nucleus of *Birds of War*, which opened in UK cinemas this week after winning the special jury award for journalistic impact at Sundance and collecting further prizes at the Thessaloniki, Seattle, and Visions du Réel film festivals. Directed by Boulos and Habak themselves, the film draws on thirteen years of accumulated archive footage alongside the couple's own voice notes, video calls, text messages, and selfies, weaving these fragments into a documentary that is as much a love story as it is a record of devastation. Boulos has spoken candidly about her original intention, which was to make a film about Lebanon and the cascading crises now consuming it; yet the deeper she and Habak looked into their shared history, the more they understood that the most honest lens available to them was the personal one.

"To make it understandable," she has explained, "we should tell the story how we saw it" — a modest statement that quietly contains a radical editorial decision. What distinguishes *Birds of War* from the considerable body of Syrian conflict documentary work that preceded it is precisely this refusal to treat war as the whole story.