CAPTURED ON FILM.(filmmaking in Syria and the Middle East)

"On the one side, it's a tragedy that I have made only two feature films in thirty years," the Syrian director Ossama Mohammed told me last month. "Yet, from the other side, I see it as a miracle." We were sitting in the Rawda Cafe, the center of the modest intellectual life of Damascus, where television stars, screenwriters, and poets gather for leisurely mid-morning chats. The clatter of backgammon boards and the smell of apple-flavored tobacco from sheesha pipes filled the room. A man in a black jacket at the next table, who appeared to be reading a magazine, occasionally leaned toward our conversation.

"In Syria, we have this huge army of secret police and a complete absence of legal protections," Mohammed said, in a quiet, angry voice. "You can go to jail for thirty-five years and nobody will ask about you." He is fifty-two and broad-chested, with an unruly beard and wiry gray hair streaming down his back; his eyes are the same color as his habitual unsmoked cigar. "People here have a sense of the balance of forces," he said. "They realize they are not strong enough to resist." He cautioned, "In Syria, what we keep inside our imagination--what we don't tell--that is the main reality."

Nearly every Middle Eastern country is governed by an authoritarian regime, but that hasn't kept many of those countries--notably, Iran and Egypt--from developing surprisingly lively cinematic traditions. In a quarrelsome, voluble region, Syria is a strangely muted place. I wondered if, by examining Syrian movies and talking to Syrian filmmakers, I could glimpse this closely guarded inner world.

Mohammed's films, "Stars in Broad Daylight" (1988) and "Sacrifices" (2002), are merciless indictments of the Baathist dictatorship that has controlled Syria since 1963, when it came to power in a military coup. Both movies have received international acclaim; they were presented at the Cannes Film Festival, and "Stars" won first prize at the Festival of Valencia and at the International Festival of Rabat. This month, they will be shown in America, as part of a retrospective of Syrian cinema, at Lincoln Center. "Stars" explores the toxic effect of totalitarianism on ordinary Syrians, as seen through the internal battles of a dysfunctional family. The oldest of three children works for the phone company, where he casually listens in on telephone calls. Corrupt and brutally insouciant, he forces his siblings to become engaged to people they despise, in order to expand his land holdings. He encourages his brother to savagely beat their sister's suitor, then makes his sister get involved with a member of the regime, who rapes her. Not coincidentally, the actor playing this monstrous character looks like Hafez al-Assad--the man who ruled Syria for nearly thirty years, until his death, in 2000. Funny, violent, and blunt, "Stars" is perhaps the greatest film to come out of Syria. It should have been the debut of a director of international stature. Both "Stars" and "Sacrifices" required years of negotiation with government censors, and, in both cases, after Mohammed completed the film, his final cut was rejected, meaning that the film was effectively banned at home.

Although many foreign critics have portrayed Mohammed and other Syrian directors as symbols of artistic victimization, he defiantly rejects that role. "Do you want me to play the hero?" he asked. "Do you want me to repeat two hundred times each day that my films are forbidden? This is my society. I belong to this world. I am not a victim."

Yet a look around the Rawda Cafe suggests that the creative class in Syria has a lot of time on its hands. One writer I met has a job counting the city's street lamps. Most of the country's filmmakers, including Mohammed, are employees of the National Film Organization, which manages the production of all Syrian films. Mohammed is paid two hundred and fifty dollars a month, which is the average government wage. This salary allows filmmakers to pay their rent and spend much of their day idling at the Rawda, which has the atmosphere of a perpetual, brooding salon. For the past few years, Mohammed told me, he has been adapting "Manifest Illusions," a deeply psychological memoir by Raja al-Taey, a Syrian feminist; but he recently set the project aside. The National Film Organization has a small budget, and produces only one or two movies a year, so there's no rush.

The Syrian government and the filmmakers have developed an odd, uncomfortable dependency upon each other. Ibrahim Hamidi, the Damascus bureau chief for the pan-Arab newspaper Al Hayat, which is published in London, says, "By permitting Ossama Mohammed and others to make movies financed by the government, the regime is harming the filmmakers' credibility, and also trying to contain them. The films get awards abroad, which is good P.R. for the regime. At the same time, Syrians aren't allowed to see the movies." While filmmakers have the opportunity to test the limits of government censorship, the regime acquires an intimate sense of the mood of the nation's intellectuals. "The people who rule Syria are not stupid," Hamidi said. "They play a very sophisticated game."