Effectively banned by the government, a Syrian film resurfaces

On the phone from a hotel in Damascus, Syrian filmmaker Ossama Mohammed was trying to paint me a picture of the view from his window. He could see Mount Qasioun, which looks out over the city. He could also see the presidential palace — “where the new person is spending his time now,” he said. It was evening there, and he could hear the sound of 100 mosques in prayer.

He and his wife, opera singer Noma Omran, are “not people of religion,” he explained. But that sound moves them. “It’s not only the word of prayer,” he said. “The melody itself — it came from very deep culture, from multicultural Syria, from prehistoric Syria.” Since 2011, he and Omran had been living in exile in Paris. After Bashar Assad’s regime fell in December, Mohammed said, his wife persuaded him that they should go there directly.

“The timing — it’s just amazing,” he marveled. Technically, we were on the phone to discuss the new restoration of “Stars in Broad Daylight,” his 1988 debut feature, which will screen in New York City at the Museum of Modern Art’s annual film preservation showcase, To Save and Project, on Sunday and Jan 28.

That the film is resurfacing now is pure coincidence. The restoration had its premiere at Il Cinema Ritrovato, a festival of vintage cinema in Bologna, Italy, in June, when no one could have known that Assad would lose power. As it happens, “Stars in Broad Daylight” offers a harsh commentary on his father and predecessor, Hafez Assad, who died in 2000. More than one viewer has noted the resemblance between the former leader and the star.

The movie revolves around the complicated relationships of an extended family, the Ghazis. Khalid (Abdellatif Abdul Hamid) — the most domineering of the clan, and the one who looks like Hafez Assad — has tried to orchestrate marriages for two of his siblings to maximize the Ghazis’ land ownership. After one bride runs from the double wedding, Khalid’s tyranny becomes even more overt.

When you are living under dictatorship, Mohammed explained, you are never a movie’s sole screenwriter. “Assad is the co-writer,” he said. “He is on your shoulder writing with you.” In “Stars in Broad Daylight,” he added, “I took him from my shoulder, and I saw him in the framing, inside.” Still, he explained, his interest was not in insulting Assad but exploring what he saw as the twisted mindset that dominated Syria under his rule. “It’s about the psychological and mental deformity that infects the individual under dictatorship,” Mohammed said.

“Stars in Broad Daylight” developed something of an underground reputation in Syria, the filmmaker said, and could be found in pirated copies. A friend sent him an image of a poster for the movie hanging in a Damascus bar. “This generation, seeking art, theater, music — they know,” he said, adding, “the film where Assad was insulted and he banned the film — it’s enough to be famous.”

But no high-quality version has been available anywhere. When the film showed in New York in 2006 at Lincoln Center, the theater played it off a videotape; in 2017, MoMA screened it from a file. Cecilia Cenciarelli, head of research and special projects for the Cineteca di Bologna, said it was one of the most challenging titles that the organization had restored in collaboration with the World Cinema Project, an initiative of Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation that preserves work from countries neglected in Western film histories.

For a start, it was unclear if a restoration-grade copy existed. Mohammed had deposited a print with the Cinémathèque Française, but it was in poor shape; Cenciarelli tracked down copies with Spanish subtitles, but subtitles would be obstacles to a preservation effort. Then Mohammed remembered that the film had screened on German television in the 1990s, at a time when TV stations routinely used 35 mm prints for broadcast.

Cenciarelli, who speaks Italian, English, French and a little Spanish, but not German, took old TV guides from the Cineteca’s library, ran them through Google Translate — and found a match. But the station told her the print had been dubbed in Turkish. “There’s a very, very large Turkish community in Germany,” she said. Her hope was that the cataloger had simply mistaken the film’s dialogue, which is in Arabic, for Turkish. Sure enough, the station had a pristine print in the original language.

The other obstacle, Cenciarelli said, was the rights holder, the National Film Organization of Syria, with whom communication was fruitless. Luckily, she said, Mohammed retained the rights to screen it noncommercially, so the restored “Stars in Broad Daylight” could always show at festivals such as To Save and Project, even though a release wasn’t in the cards.

But now, with the ouster of the younger Assad, maybe the film can be screened more widely. Mohammed is looking into showing it in Syria. He said that people every day ask him about a screening.

Mohammed acknowledged that it was a tense time in Syria, but he also spoke of the “explosion” of “expression and imagination” now that the Assad regime is gone: “If you have five taxis in the day, you will hear amazing discoveries.”

There are also familiar sensations. “The main pleasure is when you walk in the popular market, and you see a 60-, 70-year-old man who was working there from the beginning of history,” he said.

He and Omran are there temporarily, for now — their Damascus apartment, which had been watched over by a caretaker, bore the hallmarks of “14 years of dust and emptiness” — and he said that thousands of other Syrians who left have returned to witness the moment. There’s something about it that doesn’t quite feel real: “It is not normal — this is the feeling,” he said. “It’s as if you are a part of a movie, and the movie is so different.”