Birds of War (2026)
Some films you watch, and some you live alongside. Birds of War belongs to the second kind. The filmmakers Janay Boulos and Abd Alkader Habak, a London-based Lebanese journalist and a Syrian activist and cameraman, turn the camera on themselves and their own thirteen-year love story, assembled from the personal footage they shot across revolution, war and exile.
Fresh from a Special Jury Award for Journalistic Impact at Sundance, it reaches the UK as part of the second Muslim International Film Festival. It is a documentary that flatly refuses to keep the personal and the political in separate rooms, and it is all the more powerful for it.
I feel incredibly privileged to have caught an early screening of Janay Boulos and Abd Alkader Habak's Birds of War (2026) ahead of its highly anticipated appearance at the Muslim International Film Festival this coming July. Billed with the poignant tagline "You are more than a story", the documentary chronicles the extraordinary romance between a London-based Lebanese journalist and a Syrian activist and cameraman.
Told entirely through 13 years of deeply personal video archives, it tracks their relationship across the tumultuous backdrop of Middle Eastern revolutions, brutal war, and forced exile. It's a staggering piece of cinema that immediately justifies its recent Special Jury Award for Journalistic Impact at the Sundance Film Festival.
What makes the film so utterly gripping is its unvarnished, visceral approach to storytelling. Because much of the footage was captured on amateur devices in the heat of the moment, it has a raw, immediate quality that polished, big-budget productions simply cannot replicate. The directors make a brilliant stylistic choice by overlaying the couple's intimate text messages onto the screen, creating a haunting juxtaposition. You're reading sweet, everyday romantic banter while watching harrowing, terrifying scenes of war and destruction unfolding in the background. It's this masterful blending of the profoundly personal with the globally catastrophic that makes it such a deserving Sundance winner; it captures the sheer human and journalistic impact of conflict like no other film I've seen recently.
On a purely emotional level, the documentary is an absolute powerhouse. There were several moments during the screening where I was genuinely moved to tears, completely overwhelmed by the sheer resilience of the human spirit and the power of love to endure in the most unforgiving circumstances on earth. I am just so happy that these two remarkable people found each other amidst the chaos. Yet, as uplifting as their personal triumph is, the film serves as a devastating reminder of the ongoing tragedy for all mankind that these brutal conflicts continue to rage on.
Birds of War is a love story for the ages, a beautifully crafted, heart-wrenching, and ultimately triumphant documentary that will stay with you long after the screen fades to black.
I do not cry easily at the cinema, and this one had me going more than once. It is the rare film that earns its tears honestly, by showing you a whole life rather than telling you how to feel about it. I will be pressing it into the hands of everyone I know, and I suspect it will be one of the films I remember longest from this year's festival.
Reviewed from a press screener for the Muslim International Film Festival (MIFF), where Birds of War screens during the 2026 edition, 2 to 5 July.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Muslim International Film Festival (MIFF): Ghost School (2025), Once Upon a Time in Gaza (2025), Hijra (2025)
More from the 2020s: Look Back (2024), The Whale (2022), All That's Left of You (2025)
More documentary: Roberto Rossellini, Living Without a Script (2025), I Want Her Dead (2025)
