Several months before his native country decided to ban his new film about the husband of a Palestinian suicide bomber, the Lebanese director Ziad Doueiri got into a car with tinted windows and set out to an undisclosed location in the southern suburbs of Beirut, headed for a meeting with Hezbollah, the Lebanese paramilitary group.

Doueiri’s 1998 feature debut, “West Beirut,” a largely autobiographical film about his childhood during the Lebanese Civil War, had played to great success at home and abroad. He wanted to gauge Hezbollah’s response to his third feature film, “The Attack.” Based on a best-selling novel by the Algerian writer Yasmina Khadra, the story follows a secular Palestinian doctor living in Tel Aviv who is trying to understand why his wife was driven to commit a heinous suicide attack. “I absolutely wanted the film to be shown in Lebanon,” Doueiri told a New York audience at an early screening of the film in April.

Doueiri sought out Hezbollah not solely because of the tricky subject matter of “The Attack,” but also because to make the film, the director had broken Lebanese laws prohibiting citizens from traveling to Israel or doing business with the Israelis. Doueiri knew he was going against the rules when he decided to shoot “The Attack” in Israel. “From the time that you are a sperm, you know about those laws,” he told me. But he was determined to tell this particular story as authentically as possible — which meant filming in Israel. “No other city looks like Tel Aviv,” he said.

With the help of his lawyer mother, he sent a certified letter to the Ministry of Information, intended for the Army, alerting them of his intentions to go to Tel Aviv and asking for their “guidance” on how to proceed. Doueiri didn’t want to be accused of being a spy. He never heard back. “Fifteen days later, I packed my bags and left,” he said. He used his American passport, which he had obtained during his two decades in L.A., where he worked as a cameraman on Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs” and “Pulp Fiction.”