The war in Iraq does not appear in the film, but it is clearly the off-camera elephant in the room. "You think the war in Iraq has been good for the oil business. It's been really good for the oil business," says Gaghan, noting that when filming began, it cost him $23 to fill up his tank. It now costs $58.

During his research, the investigative journalist Seymour M. Hersh introduced Gaghan to Richard Perle, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, who is considered one of the neocon architects of the war in Iraq. It was weeks before the American invasion, and the screenwriter had just returned from Damascus, where he heard prognostications of what a quagmire the war would be.

"I'm in Perle's kitchen. He's passing out favors in the Bush administration. He's dispensing wisdom and making me a cappuccino from this $3,000 cappuccino machine. He's really smart, really clever, and I'm having a great time. I feel really lucky. I asked him, 'Mr. Perle, I have just one question. Who's going to run Iraq?' He said, 'Oh, no, no, no, we're not going into that. Who says we're going into Iraq?'

"I said, 'Really, if we went in, who's going to run the country?' He said, 'It's a shame we haven't done a better job of supporting Ahmad Chalabi. He's a wonderful man.' I said, 'Listen, Chalabi hasn't been in Iraq since 1959. He wears a Hermès tie. He lives in Paris. If he goes back there, they're going to reject him like a bad organ transplant.' "

Gaghan says that suddenly Perle got very serious. "He looked at me like 'Who let you in here?' He stared daggers at me for about a minute." Suddenly the doorbell rang. "He said, 'Excellent. I'll introduce you to Bibi on the way out.' It was Benjamin Netanyahu, dropping by with nine Uzi-wielding Mossad agents." As Perle ushered Gaghan out, Perle's wheaten terrier puppy, Reagan, began jumping around and, as Gaghan describes it, "pawing the crotch of Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu just stands there and shakes with rage. So I pulled the dog away from him and said, 'Now, now, Reagan, not on former heads of state,' and they just held the door open and let me out."

Portraits of impotence

ABU-ASSAD'S journey also began with research. He talked to people who knew suicide bombers. He read Israeli police files about suicide bombers. Most importantly, he interviewed a lawyer who represented suicide bombers who had failed on their missions, whose bombs had not gone off as intended, and who thus had wound up in Israeli jails.

What does he think motivates them?

"I think the feeling of impotency, literally and figuratively," says Abu-Assad, who speaks Arabic, Hebrew, Dutch and English. "It's human nature. Somebody with his power is humiliating you. It makes you feel worse. It makes you feel like a coward that you can't do anything. You don't have an appetite for food. You don't have sex. The moment I was once humiliated by a soldier, it took me a long time to enjoy sex again."

His humiliation wasn't even a particularly big deal. "A checkpoint thing. Facing the wall. You are afraid."

Abu-Assad's film is much like a Palestinian "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead": It focuses on two people on the periphery of history and watches them breathe. If the culminating event is horrific, the day-to-day buildup is almost surreal in its very mundaneness. When the two heroes make their martyrs' video — in the same spot in Nablus where real suicide bomber farewell videos are shot — the camera fails to work, so they have to redo it. Their guerrilla group handlers watch and noisily eat their lunch — packed by the unsuspecting mother of one of the would-be bombers.

Indeed, the guerrillas appear less ideologues than thugs preying on young men's despair. When one of the friends suggests they'll get to paradise afterward, the other smacks him on the head as if to knock that naiveté right out. One of the protagonists is motivated by family shame — he is the son of an Israeli collaborator killed by Palestinians. Yet their anguish seems palpable — born of some mixture of poverty, hopelessness, fatherlessness and disenfranchisement. Abu-Assad shows their journey from the poor streets of Nablus to the beautiful and prosperous high-rises of Tel Aviv, a shocking journey, no doubt, but for American viewers it is unfortunately no more shocking than a trip from South-Central to Santa Monica.

Abu-Assad is a pacifist who doesn't believe in the values of suicide bombing, but he does place the blame for Palestinian suffering squarely on the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and formerly Gaza. Still, he didn't intend to make a polemic. "If this is the case, I could make an article about it. I didn't need to make a film."

He says he struggled to find the balance between "two different worlds and different thoughts, between the world to condemn suicide bombers and the world who finds them a hero…. The tragedy is he wanted to be a hero and protect his society from injustice, but he ended up being a terrorist. It's this balance you have to keep throughout the whole film, and you can easily fall."

Abu-Assad, whose previous film, "Rana's Wedding," was financed by the Palestinian ministry of culture, shot the movie over 40 days in Nablus, Nazareth and Tel Aviv, which he says he wouldn't have done if he'd known how hard it was going to be. "You have to shoot in a real place in real time in a war zone. It's not a safe studio that you can control. The place is in control, not you."

The filmmakers had to contend with the Israeli army and rival Palestinian factions who were all suspicious of their motives. A land mine went off yards from the set. There was an Israeli missile attack, and Palestinian gunmen ordered them to leave (six European crew members did); ultimately one Palestinian faction, afraid that Abu-Assad and his crew were making an anti-suicide bomber film, kidnapped their location manager. Although he'd never met him, Abu-Assad contacted Palestinian Prime Minister Yasser Arafat, and two hours later the crew member was released.

Abu-Assad says that the biggest surprise for him came when he began showing Islamic fundamentalists some respect. "Believe me, I was the first one in Nablus to fight against fundamentalism. Me. At the time, I was 19. We thought they were against civilization and progress. We were accused of being CIA agents or Mossad." A member of his own family became a fundamentalist, and the family thought he'd been brainwashed and ostracized him.

Twenty years later, Abu-Assad contacted his relative and then talked to fundamentalist leaders. "When they discover you respect them, just respect, they become so very, very human and alive, and you don't believe how much they open for you," he says. "If you think you're superior, you create fanatical people on the other side, especially if you're stronger. You don't know how much understanding you create when you are the strong and you do nothing but just listen."