“Stars” 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-millimeter 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” could always show at festivals like To Save and Project, even though a release wasn’t in the cards.
But now, with the ouster of the younger al-Assad, maybe the film can be screened more widely. Mohammed is looking into showing it in Syria. He said that every day people ask him about a screening.
