Mohamed Daradji knelt 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 of 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 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 carries with it a tale of hardship and difficulty: budget problems, creative battles, equipment failures. But "Ahlaam," Daradji's first feature, may 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, dedication and, to an extent, dumb luck.

Despite his hopes, the film didn't make the Oscar short list for best foreign-language film. Daradji still needs a distributor.

His film may be 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 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 class fleeing.

"Ahlaam," set largely in a Baghdad mental hospital during the U.S. 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 unrelentingly dark — in tone and in actual lighting. Daradji said he sometimes had to shoot using car headlights rigged with filters.

A Baghdad native, he left Iraq in 1995 at age 17, acquiring Dutch citizenship and a master's in film production in Britain. He returned to Iraq in autumn 2003, several months after the U.S.-led ousting of Saddam. "It was chaos," he said. "I found mental patients wandering in the street."

He and a friend helped deliver an escaped patient back to Baghdad's main asylum, and Daradji stayed on as a volunteer. "I spent two weeks going there every day, bringing clothes and cigarettes for the patients," Daradji said. Now a resident of Leeds, England, he speaks with passion about conditions in Iraq and his desire to keep filming there.

His main characters — the delusional former bride, the shell-shocked soldier and the idealistic doctor — are 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, the country had not produced a movie in decades. Functioning equipment was almost impossible to find, as were experienced crew members, and Daradji drafted his nephews and cousins into the effort. Seeking "natural performances," he deliberately chose less-experienced theater students and amateurs.

Daradji began filming in mid-2004, accompanied by a police escort, coordinating 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 U.S. patrols. Daradji lived in fear that his sets would be mistaken for some sort of insurgent training camp by a U.S. helicopter crew.

The shoot was cut short after the Dutch advised Daradji he no longer could work safely. The last straw: 24 hours in December 2004 when Daradji and several crew members were kidnapped and bullied by Sunni Muslim gunmen, then kidnapped again and bullied by Shiite Muslim gunmen, and finally jailed and interrogated by U.S. soldiers.

Since completing the film, he has spent the past year promoting it. Daradji says he's been particularly gratified by the appetite among U.S. audiences for information that humanizes the sometimes 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."