Birds of War (15)
Directed by Janay Boulos and Abd Al-kader Habak
⭑⭑⭑⭑⭑

THIS is a very unusual film, in many ways.

It’s a love letter by a couple to themselves, written in video. Who, apart from Robert Gibson in his excruciating film Video Fool For Love (1995), has ever done that?

Also, it’s the calling card of a new film production company, Habak Films, who aim to “tell human stories from Lebanon, Syria and the wider Levant”, run by that same couple: a high risk strategy by journalists turned film-makers.

And it’s a British film, financed from Scotland (Eh? How did that happen?), shot in Syria, Lebanon and London, but spoken almost exclusively in Arabic (Eh?), and composed from 13 years of personal archive that comes, most dramatically, from the midst of the Syrian civil war.

The man, Abd Al-kader Habek, is a Muslim from Idlib, gung-ho and uncritically anti-Assad, who finds himself marooned in Aleppo under Syrian and Russian bombardment. His sheer proximity to explosions and their immediate aftermath is astonishing to witness. It’s the kind of footage that never makes it into the news, humanising the violence. Both the traumatic impact and the selfless, instant heroism ring out in these communities.

And Habek doesn’t just witness and record. He acts. When a civilian convoy leaving Aleppo is bombed, he rescues a child and becomes famous, in a jaw-dropping sequence.

The woman, Janay Boulos, is a Lebanese Christian working for the BBC (Eh?) She recycles Habek’s material for the Western media and, as they collaborate, they become intimate without ever meeting (Eh?).

So, politically speaking, who are this couple? If Habek’s material is anti-Russian, Boulos’s visits to Lebanon expose her to the violence of Israel. Her stoic mum and dad are permanently on the move. Who’s to blame? “The West,” says the mother, calmly. It’s the only direct political statement in a film about two disillusioned journalists who are giving up their jobs in mainstream media.

When Habek fears his fame has made him a target he consults the “Islamists” (Eh?) and crosses the border to Turkey as an illegal migrant (Eh?) where Boulos meets him, marries him (Eh?), and clearly this is love, if a troubling kind of love between an ambitious producer and a cameraman with PTSD.

It’s when we meet them on a pro-Palestine march in central London (Eh?) that the film changes gear again: is this in fact the inside story of illegal migration to Britain and the shocking trauma such people bring with them?

If the purpose of journalism is to provide context for a wider political and geopolitical understanding of events, neither Boulos nor Habek does it, either in their reportage, or in this film. Are they avoiding it, or do they have another tale to tell?

Feeling lost in Britain Habek returns to Aleppo after Assad’s fall, but he feels a stranger there too, disillusioned by the “revolution,” and the film comes to its paradoxical but strangely convincing conclusion: it’s the story of how individuals can be “always in the wrong place” and permanently uprooted, when exiled by war. A fine theme.

Unsettling, complex, entirely real and immaculately edited, this is highly recommended. But don’t expect answers.

In cinemas July 3