For months the eyes of the world have been focused on the plight of Syrian refugees, following families as they make harrowing treks across borders. Meanwhile, Abounaddara, a celebrated Syrian film collective, has been trailing a hotshot local soccer team.  In 11 short videos posted online, Abounaddara, an anonymous group of self-taught and provocative filmmakers, shared interviews with players on a national squad. “In the team, there are opponents and supporters of the regime,” one says. “If you’re with the opposition, it’s best not to talk. But I can’t. I’d suffocate.” Each video begins with a shot of the teammates kicking around the ball, and then a group chant: “Free Syria!”  The videos, titled “The Team,” are part of Abounaddara’s unique oeuvre: brief weekly dispatches from Syrian life, in all its hues and complications. The idea is to present an alternative to mainstream coverage of the country’s fractured state, with its focus on conflict and destruction. “Our first enemy is pity,” Charif Kiwan, the group’s spokesman and only active named member, said in an interview at the New School in Manhattan. “Since the beginning, we tried to say that we are fighting for freedom, for dignity.”  The new film by the anonymous Syrian filmmaking collective imagines the family album of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, culled from his social media posts. It satirizes his role as despot and charmer.  He added, in his slightly imperfect English: “We wanted to make films in order to change the representation, about our civil society. So we decided to use the Internet to make small stories, about ordinary people.”  Since it escalated its efforts in 2011, shortly after protests against the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad began, Abounaddara (pronounced AH-boo-nah-DAH-rah) has posted more than 300 videos — one nearly every Friday, subtitled in English and French. Throughout the Syrian civil war, the filmmakers have kept their identities secret, in part so that anyone affected by the upheaval can join. Though they are coy about the number of people involved, most are Syrians, Mr. Kiwan said, operating without budgets and using borrowed equipment, struggling to make what the group calls “emergency cinema.”  “Anonymity is really a great space to invent a new world,” Mr. Kiwan said. “You can be American, Muslim, Jewish — it’s a way for us to say that art is beyond all sorts of political issues.”  Recently their work has found an international and artistic audience: In 2014, their 12-minute, single-shot film “Of God and Dogs” won the grand jury prize for shorts at the Sundance Film Festival, and that year the collective wasincluded in “Here and Elsewhere,” a showcase of art from the Arab world at the New Museum. Now it is preparing for its first New York solo exhibition, at the New School, home to the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, which honored Abounaddara with its 2014 biennial prize.  “Their work is, artistically, really outstandingly beautiful,” said Carin Kuoni, director of the center, whose prize is for artists who further social justice. Abounaddara’s exhibition and a related conference, “The Right to the Image,” begins on Thursday; its films will be screened and fill the gallery windows of a New School building.  Their wry vérité style, which occasionally borrows images from Western media, “plays in a very, very sophisticated way with the history of filmmaking, subverts it, toys with it and advances it,” Ms. Kuoni said. The distribution model, with all the videos shared freely on Vimeo, was another reason the group waschosen. “All of a sudden we and the world outside of Syria have immediate, direct and genuine access to a situation on the ground, in the country torn by war,” she said.  Suzanne Nossel, executive director of the PEN American Center, and a former leader of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International USA, said she was struck by Abounaddara’s brevity — little narrative or background is given on screen — and its use of close-ups.  “The abruptness, this jarring sense that you’ve been pulled so intimately, for just a moment, into somebody’s terrifying world, and then you’re thrust out again — and it’s over for you, but not for them,” she said. “You can spend a few minutes and see behind the headlines, and get a sense of the pain and the impact of this on individual after individual. It’s a powerful approach.”  Abounaddara’s work is not without its controversies. The group received a special mention at the Venice Biennale this year, then pulled its videos out of the exhibition at the last minute, because it said festival organizers censored them by not adhering to the conditions it set for screening. (A spokesperson for the Biennale curator, Okwui Enwezor, told the site Hyperallergic that “there was, of course, no censorship whatsoever, but on the contrary, the films were shown exactly as agreed upon by Abounaddara.”)  The Venice experience made Abounaddara feel like the geopolitical flavor of the month. “We refuse many, many invitations, many honors,” Mr. Kiwan said, “because the market wants to have just the name of Syria in their catalog, but there’s nothing true with that.”  An entrenched belief of Abounaddara’s is that the media is driven to use ever more graphic images of tragedies in the Arab world, images that would not be tolerated in Western nations. (The United States military, for example, tightly controls depictions of dead American soldiers.) It’s also a form of propaganda used sharply by the Islamic State, or Isis. The perverse effect, Mr. Kiwan said, is to desensitize viewers to suffering. “Once you watch those photos all the time, then you are not surprised,” he said. “You consider those people not very important, because they are dying all the time. So you finish by telling yourself, these people are not like me, not human like me.”  Abounaddara has largely resisted showing any violence in its videos, and Mr. Kiwan has argued forcefully, in panels at the United Nations and in op-ed articles, that the news media should use the same standards for its people and Syrians.  Of course, those images can also have a galvanizing effect, as with the photo of a drowned Syrian boy, 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi, which helped crystallize the trauma of the migrant crisis.  To balance cultural sensitivity and individual depth in conflict storytelling is extremely difficult, said Ms. Nossel, the PEN American director. And in a place like Syria, where civilians have experienced a total loss of control, “wanting to reclaim the narrative is very understandable,” she said. She described Abounaddara’s work as “an extraordinary act of courage.”  Finding subjects is not a problem, Mr. Kiwan said: “People are living with the danger of death all the time, so they want to tell their story.” Satire and humor play a part, as with this week’s piece, “My Name Is Bashar,” premiering on NYTimes.com, which imagines the family album of Mr. Assad, culled from social media and set to misty music. Another, “Kill Them!,” is a tribute to Andy Warhol.  Even with its prodigious output, the group edits each piece collectively. “Their creativity and conscientiousness is very impressive and very unusual,” said Ania Trzebiatowska, artistic director of the Off Camera Film Festival in Krakow, and part of the Sundance jury that awarded the prize to Abounaddara.  Mr. Kiwan, at 47 the oldest member of Abounaddara, is an elegant, impassioned man, a political scientist by training. He escaped to Paris, dependent on the occasional teaching gig. “I have no money at all,” he said. “I lost all what I have — my home in Syria, my job.” The Abounaddara members who remain there, he said, are toiling “in the shadow.”  Many of his compatriots back home, he said, are “totally depressed, because this situation is really awful. You cannot even imagine.” But as filmmakers, he added, “our job is to keep believing in some hope.”  A version of this article appears in print on October 19, 2015, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Life Behind the Scenes of a Conflict. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Abounaddara, with only one active named member amid its ranks, provides weekly dispatches it hopes will present an alternative to more violent mainstream coverage.