Too much realism on location in Iraq

MOHAMED DARADJI knelt in the dust at the sheik's feet, begging for his life and the lives of his companions. The gunmen, who had grabbed them in midscene off a Baghdad street, were Sunni Muslims, loyalists to Saddam Hussein's fallen regime. So Daradji, a Shiite, fervently swore he was a fellow Sunni, a Baath Party member, anything to make the beatings stop.

It didn't work.

"Take them," the elder leader said as the gunmen hustled the director and his three film crew members -- two of them his young nephews -- into a pickup truck. The last thing Daradji remembers is hearing the sounds of the Tigris River nearby and knowing he was about to be executed.

"I felt the angel of death coming," said Daradji, 28.

Then he blacked out.

Every movie ever made carries with it a tale of hardship and difficulty: budget problems, creative battles, equipment failures. But "Ahlaam," Daradji's first feature, may just trump them all. Filmed in post-invasion Baghdad with antiquated equipment and an untrained crew amid collapsing security, the movie is a testament to Daradji's resourcefulness, stubborn dedication and, to an extent, sheer dumb luck.

Despite his hopes, the film, which he says has been hamstrung by the lack of a promotional budget from Iraq's erstwhile Ministry of Culture, didn't make the Oscar short list for best foreign language film. Still searching for a distribution deal, Daradji has been on the film festival circuit from Brooklyn to Cairo. It was well received at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival last weekend and will be screened at the Portland International Film Festival this month and the Tiburon International Film Festival next month.

Daradji's film may end up being the last movie to come out of Iraq for a while. The country's artistic life experienced a brief resurgence in the year after the U.S.-led invasion, with musicians, painters and actors all striving to restore Baghdad's legacy as one of the Arab world's cultural capitals. That trend has died as Iraq descends into civil war, with much of the educated, artistic class fleeing the country.

"Ahlaam," set largely in a Baghdad mental hospital during the U.S. siege of the capital, tells the tragic story of modern Iraq through the experiences of three protagonists -- two of whom spend most of the film nearly catatonic. The film is unrelentingly dark -- both in tone and in actual lighting. Some of the scenes are so murky that it's hard to tell what's happening; between unreliable equipment and constant power cuts, Daradji said he sometimes had to shoot using car headlights rigged with filters.