On stage in a packed cinema hall in central Bologna, Ossama Mohammed reads the very first line of his movie’s script: “I am a free man.” This concise, almost epitaph-like statement marks the beginning of the film Nujum Al-Nahar, or ‘Stars in Broad Daylight’.
Mohammed, a Latakia-born film director and screenwriter who has been living in exile in Paris since 2011, considers this particular film his most significant work: a piece of social criticism, more than a mere political commentary, exploring the profound impact of dictatorship on the human condition.
Then comes the following line: “If you really are free, why do you need to say it?”
The question – along with all manner of unresolved debates among artists about the purpose of cinema and the instinctive need to leave a mark – hangs in the air of the cinema hall, unanswered.
“This is a dangerous film,” Mohammed says, turning to Cecilia Cenciarelli, co-director of Bologna’s film festival, Il Cinema Ritrovato (Cinema Rediscovered). Cenciarelli herself was deeply involved in the lengthy process of restoring the film for its re-release. “It is a film about the psychological distortion that affects people living under dictatorship, and what could happen to any human being in those circumstances. Those poor people, the victims, might seem strange, even amusing, but be careful not to underestimate them: they can also be extremely, brutally dangerous, just like the characters in Nujum Al-Nahar.”
Released in 1988, the making of this film required tremendous effort from Mohammed, and no small amount of creative faith. “The dictator is in the film,” he says. “So I said to myself, ‘Let’s see what happens,’ and embraced both the pleasure and the danger of cinematic exploration.” And he succeeded. Inspired by the tradition of Georgian comedy and the cinema of Federico Fellini and Ettore Scola, Mohammed crafted a masterpiece which drew a clear allegory of the Assad regime, embodied in the subjugation of women within a patriarchal society – specifically, the biopolitical control over a younger sister’s body as she is forced into marriage. While this storyline is explored at face value in Sabah Al-Salem’s portrayal of Sana and her stifling journey, it also unmistakably serves as an allegory for Syrian totalitarianism.
The film portrays the catastrophic breakdown of the Ghazi family on the eve of two weddings in a rural village in the Alawite coastal region, northwest of Damascus. This family microcosm – dominated by a despotic older brother, Abbas, a doppelganger of Hafez al-Assad – serves as a biting allegory for the Baathist regime. It exposes how the violence of arbitrary and absolute power in a patriarchal society seeps into both the fabric of a nation and the core of a family unit. With stark, transparent imagery, the film reveals the violence that underlies heavy silences, thwarted escape attempts, and stifled weeping. Sarcastic and unconventional, this rediscovered and restored film is visually powerful, showcasing in every frame Mohammed’s extraordinary talent: his mastery of framing, an art at which Syrian directors excel.
Through an opening in the stable’s ceiling, a gap in a mountain of hay and manure, we see the silhouette of a naked child against the light, looking like the sculpture of an angel as he grabs two chickens. In the cave-like darkness below, his vulnerable deaf brother Kasser and his sister Sana look on with expressions that could be either playful or terrified: at this early point in the film, it is difficult to distinguish between the two. They each cradle a single freshly laid egg in their small, pale hands.
The viewer finds themselves wondering if the signs of dictatorship are already present in these opening scenes of childhood. However, such a didactic question wouldn’t do justice to the symbolic beauty of the film’s imagery. “I knew I could only rely on images,” the director admits, echoing the approach of other filmmakers from his generation – the second wave of great Syrian cinema, which includes masters like Omar Amilaray and Mohammad Malas. “So I quickly learned to use words as hiding places. Maybe that’s why, contrary to my fears, the National Film Organization did not try to impose any changes to the script.”
In Nujum Al-Nahar, words are indeed just places to hide, much like the evocative interiors of the coast that the camera reveals through small cracks, dusty hidden windows, and reflections in broken mirrors. This viewer is left with the sensation of sneaking into the uncomfortable and disturbingly violent recesses of the most private space imaginable: a family home.
An arduous journey of restoration
Radwan Jamoos, the actor playing the older brother Abbas, was concerned about his character’s resemblance to Assad Senior. “In the middle of the shoot,” the director recalls, “he would come to me and ask, ‘Ossama, are you sure I don’t look too much like him?’” While acknowledging the similarities, which went beyond just the short, thick moustache, Mohammed reassured Jamoos: “No one will have the courage to admit it.” And no one did – at least not out loud.
Nujum Al-Nahar was shown only once in Syria, to an audience of artists and intellectuals in Damascus in 1988, before being immediately banned. However, eager to present itself as progressive and open in the eyes of Europe, the government allowed the film to participate in international festivals. It was selected for the Quinzaine des réalisateurs (Directors’ Fortnight) at Cannes, and also screened at the Valladolid and Rabat festivals, after which it enjoyed modest distribution in Europe.
“Nevertheless, the regime prohibited public screenings in my own country, limiting it to closed circles of intellectuals abroad,” Mohammed explains. “This was the second time they imposed such a ban on cinema culture in Syria, the first being Omar Amiralay’s masterpiece Everyday Life in a Syrian Village in 1974. After all, we knew that it was practically impossible to make good cinema and be pro-regime.”
Since the uprising of 2011, Ossama has been living in exile in France, having initially gone there for a masterclass with Greek-French film director and screenwriter Costa-Gavras. In 2000, two years before the release of his second feature-length film, Sunduq Al-Dunya, in the very room where it was shot, he gathered a number of artists to sign a petition against the regime. A number of Lebanese writers and intellectuals, among them Elias Khoury and Samir Kassir, also joined the effort.
Then came the fear: the fear of not being able to return. “Le Monde had published my statements and the text, signed by 99 Syrian artists, openly and bluntly condemning the regime,” he tells Cenciarelli, recounting the beginning of his life in exile. “That night, a close friend I trusted very much, an intellectual, informed me that I was in great danger and should not ever return to Syria.”
“And I believe,” Mohammed declares thirteen years later from the stage in Bologna, “that the most heinous crime committed by Assad’s regime against the Syrian people was the slow death of culture. They made it seem unimportant, convinced people that to earn their daily bread, they needed to be part of the regime’s apparatus.” This, he explains, is why his “Stars in Broad Daylight” vanished from the place where they belonged.
In 2024, Nujum Al-Nahar was restored in 4K by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, in collaboration with the director himself. The restoration process was based on the best surviving element outside Syria: a 35mm positive print acquired by a German television network in 1994.
For the past year, in a determined effort to find any film elements related to Nujum Al-Nahar, Cecilia Cenciarelli has spoken often and at length with Ossama, and their rapport is evident on stage. Their voices break as they recount the frantic search for a print in the original language, and their disbelief at the film’s abandonment by its own producers in Syria, who to this day deny its authorship. “Dictatorship is an existential issue; it affects us as human beings,” Cenciarelli recalls Mohammed telling her during one of their video calls, before he joined the festival in Italy.
“I believe deeply in my humanity and in the humanity of artists,” he adds. “Freedom means, first and foremost, imagination. There is no cinema without imagination, not even realist cinema. Dictatorship is the colonisation of our imagination and of our humanity.”
It is no coincidence that the section of the festival which hosted Ossama Mohammed’s film and others – including Mohammad Malas’ Al-Leil (1992), which Mohammed co-wrote – was named Cinema Libero, Italian for ‘Free Cinema.’ A more apt translation might be ‘Liberated Cinema’, because the achievement of freedom is a process rather than an act; and the process of restoration is a form of liberation, one which extends to the director’s own renewed sense of hope.
“This was an orphan film, a lost, homeless film that has been rediscovered,” he reflects. “Even before restoring it, you restored a hope I believed was gone.”
For justice and beauty
“My relationship with beauty and justice began with my family – eleven people sharing a very small house, barely any space at all,” Mohammed recalls. “We used to entertain ourselves by reading poetry and singing songs, since we had no television. It was a kind of competition where if you won, you just won – you didn’t gain anything. My love for images, then – an unconditional, disinterested love – came from the poetry and songs of my childhood.”
Mohammed soon began spending more and more time outside, becoming what he describes as a “street fighter.” The first time he cried, he confesses, was at the cinema, watching Kubrick’s Spartacus. “Spartacus became my second father, and for some reason, as soon as I got back home, I went to my father – my real one – who was very religious, and I said: “Father, God does not exist.” I was surprised by his complete non-reaction. Instead of slapping me, he just smiled; instead of punishing me, he was pleased that I, his child, had questions, that I was free. That was a turning point in my life, when I decided that justice and beauty would be the focus of my ‘street fighting’.”
In cinema, he found his freedom. The director’s favourite game was, and still is, a combination of adventure, danger, and pleasure, from which his existential questions about life under dictatorship began to emerge. “All of a sudden, you feel the dictator standing beside you, behind the camera, over your shoulder as you write your script. So, I threw him in front of the camera – into the body of one of the characters.” And with gusto. “On March 20, 1988, I wrote in my diary: “Today I am a citizen of Syria.” I was ready to die for my film, my ideals of beauty and justice, the core of my cinema.”
Indeed, the core of that cinema – restored and liberated, albeit still exiled – which today stands so powerful and relevant, lies in questions about the banality of evil and the hidden nature of violence. Where does violence hide, how does it begin? Can we live without violence, or is it inevitable? It also lies in the illusion of power, the illusion of belonging to an authority, in self-distraction; the dialectic between victimhood and collective responsibility; the fracture left by the wait for a Messiah and the room it leaves for a dictator; the psychological damage to generations of people robbed of brotherhood and companionship.
And it lies in the ability to translate all of this into one beautiful, clean, universal image.
