Even before the Syrian war broke out, government officials and community leaders moved to disperse these bands and the music scene they had established. It wasn’t just that singers were spinning poetry that denounced war and corruption. The authorities, like those in many other Middle Eastern countries, accused metal musicians and fans of immorality and devil-worship.

In 2009, for instance, Bashar Haroun, a Syrian heavy-metal producer and performer, released a doom-metal track with his Aleppo-based band Orion titled, “Of Freedom and the Moor”: For freedom through war / We lose our reason and chances no more / We will stand as one / Together and on our own / Nothing but our unity / Nowhere but our home. Shortly thereafter, Syrian authorities jailed him for allegedly encouraging a “Satanic movement,” citing as evidence a T-shirt of his with skulls on it and a poster he had of the Norwegian black-metal artist Burzum.

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Now, the same government that, prior to the war, condemned, threatened, and jailed heavy-metal musicians for their sonic storytelling is battling extremists who have also banned non-Islamic music and targeted musicians in parts of rebel-held Syria, in a conflict that has killed 150,000. Is music really more sinful than such devastating violence? Darwish wants his film to focus on these kinds of questions, not on the politics of the civil war.

“Sometimes I find myself forced to use my cellphone for outdoor filming in excessively dangerous parts of the country since it's easier to hide in case I get stopped by armed forces,” Darwish said, “and sometimes a borrowed camera from a friend for indoor interviews and concert footage.” Mostly self-taught, Darwish collects cellphone clips from the front, DSLR clips from the road, and SLR clips from safer areas on a hard disk and cuts his film on a laptop at home—so long as the power stays on. “The lack of electricity is truly annoying,” Darwish added. “For a while I even found myself going from one city to another just to follow the electricity … and that alone puts me at risk of getting blown to pieces along with my gear and footage.”

His film follows Syria’s metal pioneers from the cultural hub of Aleppo to the studio hub of Damascus, and to refuges as far as Beirut. Living between cities and unable to find other work in a broken economy, he has had to sacrifice almost everything to cover the costs of the film. “I had to sell many of my things,” Darwish told me.

In 2013, Haroun created “Live Under Siege,” a series of metal concerts at Buzz Cafe and other venues in Aleppo to urge underground youth not to turn against each other as fierce fighting broke out in the city. Darwish came to not only film the daring performances but also to play guitar, jamming beneath a noose someone hung satirically from the ceiling. One show took place on Christmas Eve, during one of the heaviest bombardments Aleppo witnessed during the war.

“I think [Darwish’s filmmaking] is very important work,” Massih told me by email from Beirut, “because it mixes the wars that are happening on the same ground and how they intersect. First, there is the war of being a heavy-metal musician in a small, ‘third-world’ country like Syria, and the problems you face here. The second war is the Syrian war itself, which is in my opinion a proxy war, and Syrians from all sides are just tools in it.” (In the video below, Massih and drummer Aram Kalousdian finalize the musical arrangements for the song “Play the Pawn” in Aleppo in January 2012, before the city experienced its worst violence. “Today Aleppo is a shattered city,” Massih writes on YouTube. “This very basement (Aram's) that we used to rehearse in is in an abandoned area now, or maybe destroyed.”)