The Saddam Hussein show: Joel Soler's documentary Uncle Saddam explores what happens when a gay filmmaker stalks the bad boy of Baghdad. (television).

Joel Soler didn't specifically mean for his excoriating documentary portrait of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, Uncle Saddam, to get its first U.S. TV screening this month (the film premieres November 26 on Cinemax). Nor did Cinemax's owner, Home Box Office, have any idea that the United States would be in such an explosive head-to-head conflict with Saddam when it programmed the film a year ago. "The timing bothers me," says Soler. "It feels like propaganda. As it happens, the film was made two years ago and has already traveled around film festivals and been released in theaters."

Not that Soler has any sympathy for Saddam or his regime. The French-born, openly gay filmmaker gained exclusive access to Saddam's entourage and archives while in Iraq, and the resulting portrait is of a man drunk on power and obsessed with his own legacy. If Saddam weren't so murderous, the film would be funny for its high-camp elements, such as the picture gallery of Saddam portraits or details of his plans to build an island in the shape of his own thumbprint. "He is like a Roman emperor, a diva," explains Soler, who gained such intimate access by pretending he was malting a movie on the U.N. embargo. "He's campy as well as evil. When he goes on a diet, everyone in the entourage has to go on the same diet. His palaces are like hotels in Las Vegas."

Soler's time in Iraq was fraught with danger. While he scored close contact with Saddam's interior designer and other members of the entourage, he was escorted everywhere he went by two government agents. When, after two months, Saddam's reps finally started to suspect Soler's intentions, they demanded that he take blood tests to see if he had any communicable diseases. "We had gone to a hospital, and they asked me to sit down when this nurse came at me with a needle," he recalls. "I freaked out and leaped onto a table, refused to have the tests done, and screaming like a drama queen, demanded that they take me to the French embassy. I was then escorted to the border, a 10-hour journey through the desert [during which] I was convinced they would kill me." Fortunately, Soler had anticipated trouble and had made arrangements for black marketeers to smuggle out the footage he already had. It took three months to reach him.

When the film was completed, he discovered from a contact that the Baghdad regime was furious at its content. Soler himself started to receive mysterious telephone calls and death threats. He woke up one morning to discover a kerosene bomb planted in his trash can; red paint splattered across the exterior of his West Hollywood, Calif., house; and this message attached to his mailbox: "In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate, burn the satanic movie or you will be dead." Soler became the subject of an FBI investigation, a case that is still open. "I became paranoid as hell," he says. "I was already having trouble with my boyfriend, and the death threats didn't help."

While he is now in a new relationship, Soler hasn't stopped taking risks. In March 2001 he started a new documentary about Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda terrorist network. A few weeks after the September 11 attacks, he was arrested in southern Yemen and only escaped, he thinks, because he played up his homosexuality. "[The authorities] consider women and gays low-class," he said. "Either you threaten them, or they protect you. So I played up the feminine side, crying and pretending that I'd lost the gold chain my mother gave me. Once I'd done that, they no longer thought I was CIA and had me deported. When you're surrounded by men with Kalashnikovs, being gay can help you out."