by Najrin Islam
I watched Nujum an-Nahar (Stars in Broad Daylight, 1988) for the first time during the premiere of its restoration at Jolly Cinema in Bologna, Italy, last year, when director Ossama Mohammed expounded on the intricate hierarchy of intention, information, and attention that led to the film’s disappearance, re-emergence, and restoration.
Shot as an allegory for Syrian totalitarianism, this dark comedy is centred around the fictional Ghazi family from the Syrian Alawite community. It follows the stories of two Ghazi siblings—Sana (Sabah As-Salem) and Kasser (Zuhair Abdulkarim)—as preparations are underway for a double-wedding with their respective partners, who are also distant cousins within the family. Repeatedly proclaimed as an occasion for a reunion of the rather large (and dispersed) Ghazi family, the weddings fail to go through, following which Sana ends up living with her cousin Khaleel (Abdellatif Abelhammid) and his wife at their house. Khaleel is the despotic head of the family (having replaced the ageing father), and his extractive machinations render the rest of the family vulnerable to his whims. So when Sana finds love in a co-worker, the man is humiliated, and later, beaten up by Khaleel and Kasser—the latter a deaf and feeble cousin who is manipulated into compliance with Khaleel’s schemes. Over the course of the film, Sana has three prospective grooms until she is forced to marry an emigrant cousin for whom she visibly holds no affection. Kasser, disillusioned with his place in the family, departs for the city and disappears into a thick white fog of insecticide on the streets. Following Khaleel’s tyrannical exercise of control over them, Sana and Kasser—outliers in a dysfunctional family—are, respectively, consumed by fate and the anonymity of the cityscape.
An intelligible reference to the Syrian state led by President Hafez al-Assad (also an Alawite), the film was shown only once in Damascus to a small audience of artists and intellectuals in 1988 before it was banned. In its focus on the Ghazi family, the film threw light on the feudal rule of the real-life Assad family, which continued through Hafez’s son, Bashar al-Assad, for a total of 53 years until their government was overthrown by militant forces in December 2024. The film has recurring motifs in the form of caged birds, cattle, and shoes—the shoes symbolising, on separate occasions, Sana and Kasser’s fretful feet that try to find ways to escape their confinement. When Sana’s lover is spurned by the brothers, it points to an acute anxiety around admitting someone external to the Ghazi family unit through marriage, and, by extension, to the endogamous organisation of power in Syria under Assad. In such circumstances, Kasser, a man, still finds a way to escape the unit while Sana, a woman with limited mobility and choices, does not. Khaleel’s (as Assad’s) coercive authority and patronage sealed the family (and Syrian society) together in toxic dependence and caused its inexorable disintegration.
However, the film’s most daring confirmation of this parallel was in casting actor Abdellatif Abdelhamid in the role of Khaleel, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Hafez al-Assad. In Bologna, Mohammed explained how Syria was so saturated with paranoia over authoritarian surveillance that he could imagine the dictator breathing over his neck while he wrote the script. So Mohammed decided to “throw him in front of the camera” as a way to fight the institutionally cultivated fear he had internalised, and to strip the dictator of his power. The film revelled in this thrill, as it called upon the Syrian public to recognise Assad as a dictator through an indexical conceit. Film history is abounding in examples of cinematic doubling premised on psychological distress, where the double either illustrates a repressed alter ego (Persona, Black Swan) or becomes a receptacle for a colonising agent (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Get Out). In Nujum an-Nahar, the doubling works through referential recognition. Mohammed challenges the dictator’s epistemic control over public memory by controlling Assad in a diegetic frame and inserting his own critical eye in the images. When Abelhamid expressed concern over this perceived similarity on the set, Mohammed assured him that even if people noticed, nobody would have the courage to openly admit it as it would amount to contempt. This cinematic strategy thus operated on an assumed consensus, effective only in its subterranean acknowledgement of the Ghazi family’s proximity to the regime.
In his preface to the screening in Bologna, Mohammed pointed out that Syria followed the Soviet model of regulation in that the government appointed specialised committees that would accept or reject film scripts—an administrative residue of the preceding era of state-sponsored propaganda filmmaking. This committee did not reject the script for Nujum an-Nahar and allowed its production to move forward. While attributing this to a strategic play with text, Mohammed admits to having awaited censorship on the committee’s recognition of his narrative stratagem. The regime did recognise the subversive message and immediately banned the film in Syria, but its need to exhibit a progressive facade internationally led to the film’s circulation among European film festivals and, modestly, on television networks in dubbed and subtitled forms. During this limited circulation, the film was screened as part of the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes Film Festival and, subsequently, at the Valencia Festival in Spain where it won the Golden Palm Award. This frugal allowance was crucial to the film’s survival, as a 35mm positive print of the film (in its original Arabic version) was eventually traced to and retrieved from a German television network in 1994.
Having lived in exile in Paris since 2011, Mohammed recalled that he harboured no hope of ever retrieving the film. Having forsaken his dream of showing the film in his homebase Syria, Mohammed made peace with it living solely in his memory. But following a lead, he started working on the retrieval process together with Cecilia Cenciarelli, curator of the Cinemalibero (Italian for ‘free cinema’ or, more aptly, ‘cinema of liberation’) strand at the Il Cinema Ritrovato (‘Cinema Rediscovered’) festival as part of which the film screened in Bologna. (The strand showcases films that have been restored through cooperations between the Cineteca di Bologna and archival institutions in the Global South.) Both Mohammed and Cenciarelli confirmed how tracking the film elements and chains of rights for Nujum an-Nahar proved to be an exceptionally uphill task as it was (and continues to be) disavowed by its original, Syrian producers. The film was eventually restored in 2024 in 4K by L’Immagine Ritrovata Laboratory and the World Cinema Project—the latter an initiative by Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation, intent on restoring, preserving, and exhibiting films from regions that are traditionally underrepresented in Eurocentric film cultures, in collaboration with local players. Cenciarelli insists that these alliances (born out of chance encounters and individual initiatives) have helped track films that might have escaped attention during their initial release or censored following a period of hypervisibility, enabling their re-entry into film historiography. Film restoration can thus be a critical act of resistance premised on the timely convergence of erratic conditions. However, it is important to note that such randomness is often distinct to postcolonial societies that do not yet have stable preservation or restoration facilities for more organised trajectories of detection and recuperation—which, in turn, is a product of the asymmetries engendered by prolonged domination of resources by western cultural institutions.
Watching this film a second time at the Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival (BFMAF) 2025 during its UK Premiere, I was led to reflect on how discourses of salvage and recuperation impact narratives around films from the Global South as they are circulated in western film festivals. At Ritrovato, the festival used lengthy introductions to initiate the films in the Cinemalibero strand to an audience that might not, otherwise, have grasped the cultural specificities of the narratives or appreciated the restorative endeavours behind the screening events. Mohammed’s explicatory preface functioned to make Nujum an-Nahar ‘legible’ to the global spectator, and consolidated its status as a film product set for circulation in the festival circuit. Showcasing films that would usually be bracketed as ‘world cinema’, this strand has acquired symbolic capital by screening lost or forgotten films from non-Eurocentric histories of resistance while simultaneously foregrounding their Otherness within the broader framework of the film festival. I wondered: could one reframe the neocolonial structures of production and exhibition to think about this strand without the reductive essentialism implied by the categorisation? I may have found an answer at BFMAF.
In the event of its screening in Bologna, the film was not separate from the structural inequities that made its production, access, and restoration onerous. In contrast, BFMAF kept the introduction short and bereft of context (only using a quote by the director on the impotency of dictatorship), thus leaving the narrative of loss, reference, and repossession distant from the screening event. In doing so, the festival may have (unwittingly or not) lifted from the film what Stuart Hall called the “burden of representation”, where the film’s reception would have been determined not only by its historical location but also narratives of lack and debt around its material re-emergence. The informational lacuna effectively opened up space for audiences to enjoy the film without the weight of the context, and to receive the story as it was delivered by its images.
Nujum an-Nahar screened at BFMAF as part of its ‘Essential Cinema’ strand, which proposes new restorations and digitisations from the Global South every year as canonical works of cinema. Located in the border town of Berwick-upon-Tweed in the UK, the festival is rooted in a radical reparative politics. In its 20th edition now, the festival’s small scale is complemented by an internationalist focus, where pan-Arab works such as Phantom Beirut (1988, dir. Ghassan Salhab) and The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived (1974, dir. Heiny Srour) have previously been highlighted as participants in a revised cinematic canon—in a strategic move to counter the ways in which the ‘canon’ has historically materialised through a predominantly white tastemaking exercise. While situated in this ecology of western film festivals, BFMAF’s politically conscious and eclectic curation over the years has positively influenced the visibility of previously overlooked archival films, thus amending their status as a cinema of the margins. So while the film remains inaccessible to its intended audiences in Syria, the screening of Nujum an-Nahar at BFMAF following its World Premiere at Ritrovato points to the work’s newfound legitimacy in the festival circuit, which may indeed redefine the traditional centres of western cinephilia.
Najrin Islam is a London-based film writer and film programmer whose research interests encompass South Asian experimental cinema, found footage cinema, short form storytelling, and cinematic hauntologies. Her writings have featured in ArtReview Asia, e-flux Criticism, and Alternative South Asia Photography, among other publications.
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