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It has been hard to rebuild, too, because the continued blockade of Gaza has driven construction costs way up. Mansour says he intends to build a smartly furnished media center that will house a theater, museum, conference room, production facilities, and even a restaurant -- but there is little evidence of actual construction, cement now being particularly expensive with the blockade. Financing is an uncomfortable subject for the executive director. When I asked what the budget for the studio city was and who paid for it, an uncomfortable silence fell on the room, followed by nervous laughter from the bearded members of Hamas who sat at the conference table. "It's a sensitive question," Mansour said, a statement that was not surprising, given the murky origins of Hamas's funding (it is generally believed that Iran and Syria are the organization's major benefactors). The film about Akel, says Mansour, was funded by an anonymous donor.

Other projects, meanwhile, are on the way, at least in theory. Now that the documentary on Akel is complete, the next big production is supposed to be a TV series about the life of Ahmed Ismail Hassan Yassin, the blind sheikh who served the spiritual leader of Hamas until he was assassinated by Israel in 2004. But the constant challenge is recruiting experienced actors. Gaza does not have a homegrown entertainment industry, so Asdaa recruits amateurs, in one case hiring the family member of an employee. And Asdaa might be producing entertainment, but it still must adhere to Hamas's conservative social mores. "There is no problem with women acting, as long as they are covered, respect religion, and are traditional," Monsour said.

Then there is the problem of filming in wartime. For the recent documentary, the director needed to re-create the atmosphere of Gaza in the early 1990s, before the Oslo Accords, but getting some details right was difficult. For example, sequences that involve shooting or heavy fighting proved particularly challenging, and not just because Asdaa lacks the budget for Hollywood pyrotechnics. There were serious concerns that the Israeli military, which conducts regular surveillance flights over Gaza, would mistake them for real fighting or paramilitary training.

"They were scared for the actors' lives in that area," Mansour recalled. "They thought Israeli drones would attack them."

If the films do make it to distribution, Hamas should hope they meet with a better fate than its computer games. In Gaza's many computer cafes, teenagers spend hours playing Counter-Strike, a first-person shooter game from the United States played between a team of terrorists and a team of counterterrorists. It turns out that Hamas has made its own version of Counter-Strike, in which the two teams are -- no surprise -- Israel and Hamas. But the boys told me they preferred the better graphics from the American games. At one computer cafe, an owner offered me a copy of Hamas Counter-Strike for free -- apparently, no one was buying.

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