Thin reel divide

Mohammad Daradji knelt in the dust at the shaikh's feet, begging for his life and the lives of his companions.

The gunmen, who had grabbed them mid-scene off a Baghdad street, were Sunni Muslims, loyalists to Saddam Hussain's fallen regime. So Daradji, a Shiite, fervently swore he was a fellow Sunni, a Baath Party member, anything to stop the beatings.

It didn't work.

"Take them," the elderly 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.

"I felt the angel of death coming," said Daradji, 28. Then he blacked out.

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

Cauldron of creation

Daradji's film might be the last movie to come out of Iraq for a while. Ahlaam, set largely in a Baghdad mental hospital during the US siege of the capital, tells the story of modern Iraq through the experiences of three protagonists — two of whom spend most of the film nearly catatonic. The film is dark — in tone and in actual lighting.

Some scenes are so murky that it's hard to tell what's happening; Daradji said he sometimes had to shoot using car headlights rigged with filters.

The arbitrary cruelty of Saddam's regime is vividly on display in the lives of all the main characters.

The title character, Ahlaam, is driven mad when her activist fiance is arrested on their wedding day; Ali, a former soldier, is mutilated and forcibly committed for deserting the army; Dr Mehdi, the asylum's new staffer, is blackballed to the fringes of medicine because of his father's activist past. And the US soldiers who appear at the close of the film come off as one more disaster rather than anybody's saviours.

It was in this landscape that Daradji conceived Ahlaam. A Baghdad native, he left Iraq in 1995 at age 17, acquiring Dutch citizenship and a master's in film production from Leeds Metropolitan University in England. He returned to Iraq in 2003, several months after Saddam's ouster. "It was chaos," he said. "I found mental patients wandering in the street."

His main characters — the delusional former bride, the shell-shocked soldier and the idealistic doctor — are all based directly on people he met during that time.

With the idea in place, Daradji faced the logistics of bringing Ahlaam to fruition. For starters, all 35mm film stock had been banned under international sanctions as a "dual use" item that could be used to help make chemical weapons.

The equipment was impossible to find, as were an experienced crew, and Daradji drafted his nephews and cousins. Seeking "natural performances", he chose less experienced theatre students and amateurs.

Daradji began filming in mid-2004, accompanied by a police escort, co-ordinating with the Dutch embassy and telling everyone they were "student filmmakers making a short love story".

Still, the filmmaker says, they were shot at more than once by passing US patrols. Daradji lived in fear that his sets would be mistaken for some sort of insurgent training camp by a US helicopter crew.

He created a bedsheet-sized sign on the ground reading: "Please Mr Pilot. I'm an Iraqi filmmaker rebuilding Iraq. Do not shoot at me. Contact your army base."

Despite the precautions, the shoot was cut short after the Dutch embassy advised Daradji he no longer could work safely in Iraq.

The last straw: a 24-hour period in December 2004 when Daradji and several crew members achieved a sort of modern Iraq trifecta — kidnapped and bullied by Sunni gunmen, then kidnapped again and bullied by Shiite gunmen, and finally jailed and interrogated by US soldiers.

A nephew on the crew was shot in the leg during the kidnapping. While he and his crew were being treated, a new group of gunmen burst into the hospital room. They turned out to be Shiite gunmen who believed Daradji was a spy.

After more beatings and begging, the gunmen delivered them to the nearest US base.

The Americans promptly threw hoods on the men's heads and jailed them. During interrogation, an American officer threatened to send him to Abu Ghraib.

The group was eventually transported to a jail cell inside Baghdad's Green Zone, where they spent four days while the Dutch Embassy negotiated their release.

Since completing the film, he has spent the past year promoting it around the world. Daradji says he's been particularly gratified by the appetite among US audiences for information that humanises the incomprehensibly tragic Iraqi reality.

"Americans really want to know what's happening there," he said. "You hear it on the news — people killed and kidnapped and tortured. But it's just numbers."