BEIRUT, Lebanon — In the early scenes of the Syrian documentary “Our Terrible Country,” the leftist writer Yassin al-Haj Saleh explores the ruins of a rebellious Damascus suburb, his clean-shaven face, Lenin-style cap and pristine clothes marking him as a recent arrival from the mostly intact government-controlled downtown.

The camera and the man behind it, a young photographer and sometime insurgent calling himself Ziad al-Homsi, approach Mr. Saleh with reverence. It is mid-2013, two years into Syria’s revolt. Hopes for easy victory over President Bashar al-Assad are long gone, yet Mr. Saleh still has far more skin in the game than his peers, the old-school, prewar dissidents who mainly squabble in exile as younger Syrians like Mr. Homsi run the risks.

At 53, Mr. Saleh, who spent 16 years of his youth in prison, suffering torture, has just moved with his wife, Samira Khalil, to the working-class suburb, Douma. Staying in Syria, alongside those enduring daily government bombardments, is the “obvious” choice, he said.

But almost immediately, scenes unfold that complicate his heroic stance, and foreshadow the gaps between rich and poor, between secular and pious Syrians, that have helped to doom the uprising to disunity. The film, which is being shown on Saturday at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens and on Feb. 13 at Artists Space in Manhattan confronts those divides with painful honesty and illuminates the personal calamities that ensued for those who staked their lives on revolt. It is one of several documentary films made by Syrians about their country’s civil war that have made the film festival circuit in the past several years.