A love story inscribed in Aleppo's ruins: how 'Birds of War' turned two filmmakers into subjects of their own documentary

The second a shell landed close enough to shake the camera, the directors of Birds of War made the call that would shape the next two years of their lives: stay, keep rolling, do not break frame. The decision cost them sleep, weight and, by their own account, a measure of composure. It also gave them the footage that anchors an award-winning docudrama about love and siege — a film in which the two filmmakers behind the lens become, reluctantly, the story.

That is the unusual premise at the centre of a film that turns the conventions of war reportage inside out. Most documentaries about besieged cities foreground the people doing the surviving. Birds of War, by contrast, insists that the people doing the watching — the couple holding the camera — are part of the damage. The result is less a piece of journalism than a confession dressed up as one, and it lands with unusual force for exactly that reason. As The Guardian's profile of the directors, published on 1 July 2026, puts it: the film exists because its makers fell in love in Aleppo, and nearly failed to finish it because of what they saw there.

A romance that doubles as a dispatch

The film opens in the rubble-strewn streets of the old city, where the directors — both experienced reporters with prior assignments in conflict zones — arrive expecting to chronicle the lives of medics, families and rescue volunteers. Instead, the camera keeps drifting back to each other. A hand on a shoulder in a dark corridor. A half-finished sentence, aborted when a round lands nearby. The romance is not narrated; it is inferred, in the way the lens finds them between takes. The audience understands long before the directors say so out loud that the film is in love with its own subjects, and that the subjects are aware of it.

The Guardian piece leans into that paradox. The directors explain, plainly, that they did not plan to make a love story — they planned to make a war film — and that the love story inserted itself when they were too exhausted to keep it out. "Get away from there — run!" is one of the captured lines in the film, a shouted warning between the two as a strike lands, and it functions as both a literal survival instruction and a metaphor for the project itself: every time one of them tries to back off, the other pulls them back in.

Why a therapist had to be in the edit suite

The film's second, less reported innovation is methodological. The directors told The Guardian they brought a psychotherapist into post-production, on the record, because the raw footage contained material neither of them could watch alone. The therapist's role was not to green-light scenes but to sit through the rushes with the pair, frame by frame, and tell them when a sequence was being included for the wrong reasons — when they were rewatching footage because it was emotionally unresolved, not because it served the film.

That is a striking admission from reporters who, by training, are supposed to maintain professional distance from the people they cover. Here, the reporters are the people they cover, and the distance is unrecoverable. The Guardian notes that this kind of reflexive filmmaking — where the maker's interior life becomes part of the archive — is not new, but rarely has it been performed so openly, or so close to the bone. The therapist, by the directors' account, was not a luxury; she was a structural safeguard against the kind of self-indulgence that ruins war reportage from the inside.

The Aleppo the film could not show

Some of the most important context sits outside the frame. Birds of War was made during the long tail of the assault on eastern Aleppo that began in 2016, when the city — once Syria's largest urban centre and a byword for cosmopolitan commercial life — became shorthand for what siege warfare does to a civilian population. Western wire reporting from that period documented the collapse of hospital capacity, the displacement of tens of thousands of residents, and the eventual reconquest of the enclave by Syrian government forces backed by Russian air power. The Guardian piece does not re-litigate the geopolitics; it does, however, note that the directors returned to the city multiple times between visits, and that the shape of the place they filmed in was different each time — both because of new damage and because of the shifting political dispensation under which they worked.

Two readings of the film sit uneasily alongside each other. The first holds that the romantic frame is a legitimate response to an inhuman subject — that to make a film only about the dead and the displaced is to flatten them, and that the presence of the directors as complicit, falling-in-love witnesses is a form of moral honesty. The second holds that the frame is an intrusion; that viewers expecting testimony from inside a siege get, instead, a meditation on the filmmakers' own emotional life at a moment when the city's own cries might have commanded the bandwidth. The Guardian profile does not adjudicate. It quotes both the directors' defenders and the critics in the festival circuit who have called the film brave, narcissistic, or both — often in the same breath.

Stakes and what the film asks of an audience

What Birds of War actually puts on the table, beneath the romance and the post-production confessional, is a question about the ethics of bearing witness at scale. If a reporter cannot return from a siege unchanged, should the audience see that wreckage? Or does showing it honour the people who cannot speak for themselves, by proving that the reporting cost the reporters something too? The directors land, in their Guardian interview, on a third option: that the wreckage was inseparable from the work, that the romance and the reportage were the same act, and that concealing either would have been a worse betrayal than revealing both.

The film has begun to travel — festival screenings, the profile notes, including recognition described as award-winning without naming the specific prize in the public-facing account — and with it a debate that runs well beyond cinema. Birds of War is, among other things, an argument that the reflexive turn in war journalism is no longer optional. The next generation of filmmakers who go to places like Aleppo, Khartoum or the edges of Khan Younis will arrive carrying phones and trauma in roughly equal measure. The film suggests, quietly, that the only honest way to report from those places is to also report on what the reporting does to you — and to bring professional help into the room before the edit becomes an excuse.

*Desk note: this publication treats Birds of War as both a film and a methodology. The wire line, exemplified here by The Guardian's profile, treats the romance as a human-interest hook; this piece reads the romance as the argument and treats the question the film poses — who is the subject of war reportage, and what do they owe the audience — as the through-line.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Aleppo_(2012%E2%80%932016)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleppo