Syria has many battlefields. There are front-line positions in millennia-old towns and cities, gun battles for streets and corners that sometimes change hands like the ebb and flow of a tide, rapidly eroding communities. There are other stages for this conflict, like movies, television, and online videos. They can be less bloody, in a literal sense. In their whitewashing of facts, however, their wielding of words and images to influence and inflict harm, they are no less ruthless. Syrians are not the only combatants.

The latest salvo from Damascus is toward Saudi Arabia, for its support of Syria’s rebels, and comes in the form of an hour-and-a-half movie called “The King of the Sands.” Much of the dialogue in the movie, which is in English and was directed by Najdat Anzour, a fervent supporter of the Assad regime, is stilted, and some characters confusingly enter scenes with little introduction. Still, the message of “King of the Sands,” which cost seven million dollars to produce, is clear: it’s aimed at gravely insulting the founder of the modern kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the late King Abdul Aziz.

The movie depicts a young Abdul Aziz as a violent plunderer raiding desert camps, stealing valuables, maniacally smashing a man’s head with a stone, and performing religious ablutions with the blood of an enemy. He is portrayed as a dishonorable hypocrite, permitting the stoning of a young couple for alleged adultery while he rapes several women. (Anzour avoided some taboos: there are no explicit sex scenes.)

The King is presented as a lustful brute throughout his life. In several scenes, he is a wheelchair-bound old man who, with a quivering hand, reaches between the thighs of a nervous girl in a niqab to deflower her. As if all that wasn’t enough, the movie portrays Abdul Aziz as a tool of the British who sells out Palestine by agreeing to allow the creation of a Jewish state in its place.

Anzour draws a straight line from the alleged cruelty of the late King to global terrorism, 9/11, the London bombings, Osama bin Laden, and the armed Syrian rebels fighting Assad’s forces. It is not subtle. “We might have killed the man,” a male voice says over an image of bin Laden, “but did we kill the idea?”

Predictably, it has angered Saudis, for whom Abdul Aziz is a cherished historical figure. Saudi sheikhs issued fatwas calling for Anzour’s death. “Did you hear about this morning’s fatwa?” Anzour asked me, reaching for a printout on the coffee table in his office in Damascus. “A Saudi fatwa to kill Najdat Ismail Anzour,” it began, “because in his latest film he insults Islam by attacking the Saud family.” The Saudis’ reaction was predictable enough—they tolerate little criticism of the modern country’s founding father—even though the movie has received little play. It premièred on September 11th at the Commonwealth Club in London, and was shown once at the opulent Syrian Opera House, in Damascus, in mid-December. It is not playing in Syria at the moment, although Anzour said he has plans to show it in several Syrian cities, including the regime strongholds of Latakia and Tartous, as well as the divided city of Aleppo. “You know, there are some challenges, because of the security situation,” he said.

That’s putting it mildly. The rebel half of Aleppo is a mass of rubble and ruins, the result of government shelling. There is little, if any, electricity, let alone functioning movie theatres. The government-held half, although still roughly resembling an urban residential landscape with utilities like electricity (that frequently cuts out), is also subject to rebel fire. Anzour claims he has received interest from art houses in the Netherlands, Canada, and the U.S., among other places, as well as Assad’s strongest allies, Iran and Russia.

One of the King’s sons, Prince Talal bin Abdul Aziz, is personally insulted in the film, which suggests that his mother was merely a “bedmate” of Abdul Aziz, not his wife; he wrote on Twitter that “this film will end up in the garbage bin of failed art works.” The Prince added, also on Twitter, that he had asked Assad, through a mutual friend, to ban the film.

A senior Syrian government adviser confirmed that the Prince’s friend had approached the regime, saying it was done “in a very polite way.” The film “might be an opportunity,” the adviser said. “We want to give somebody like Prince Talal an opening, a chance for the good wing of the Saudi establishment, against the hawks. All of this killing and beating and the dead, and nothing opened up a channel between us except a film.” He added, less politely, “It’s laughable that a government that until now won’t let a woman drive a car wants to talk about a country where women fly Boeings.… This film portrays a clash of cultures, not a clash of civilizations, because the Gulf countries don’t have a civilization. The sewage network in Damascus is older than the Gulf states.”

The idea that the film was a political success, or gave Syria an opening with the Saudis, is “absolute nonsense,” according to Nawaf Obaid, a fellow at Harvard University and a counselor to both Prince Mohammad bin Nawaf, the Saudi ambassador to the United Kingdom, and Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former director of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence service. Saudi Arabia’s tensions with Assad run deep. The Sunni kingdom has strongly expressed its support for Syria’s rebels, funnelling money and munitions as well as providing political support. It has had a troubled relationship with Damascus over the past decade or so, predating the rebellion, particularly after the 2005 assassination of Rafik Hariri, the Saudi-backed former Prime Minister of Lebanon, in a massive car bomb widely blamed on Syria and its local Lebanese allies. “It’s a silly, misleading, and amateurish film,” Obaid said. “This would surely not be a way to get us to listen or even talk to them! Bashar’s sycophants are delusional as always.”

Anzour professed to be pleased with the reaction his movie has provoked. “So what? Let Talal talk,” he said of the Saudi Prince. “Of course he’s going to talk, I’m discussing his father.” Anzour is fifty-nine, with slicked-back silver hair and a neatly trimmed white beard. He has worked in the film industry for thirty years, and over the past decade has addressed the issue of Islamic extremism several times through television mini-series and movies. “This film didn’t come out of nowhere,” Anzour said. His recent Ramadan soap opera, “Under the Homeland Sky,” was filmed, to much criticism, in an outer suburb of Damascus while the area was being attacked by government troops.

Anzour denies receiving any funding or other assistance from the Syrian government. “This is my propaganda, not the regime’s,” he said. “I’m a Syrian. I am defending this country.” Still, at one point in the interview, he stepped away to take a telephone call. It was General Ali Mamlouk, Syria’s top security officer and a close adviser to President Assad.