Lewiston – Police officers don helmets and raise riot shields. Snipers wait shrouded on a snowy roof. White supremacists and angry anti-Nazis begin shouting and shoving.

Low, rumbling music swells, permeating with dread the scene from the new documentary,”The Letter.”

“It’s meant to be scary,” said Ziad Hamzeh, the director of the film. “It’s the truth. The community was terrorized.”

His film tells the story of Lewiston Somalis: their flight from Somalia, their arrival here in Maine and the fallout that began a year ago, on Oct. 1, 2002, with the “Open Letter to the Community” penned by Lewiston Mayor Larry Raymond.

The mayor’s letter asked local Somalis to spread the word: The city had reached its limit. Raymond asked Somalis to stop coming in such large numbers.

“It was the element that provoked most of what followed,” said Hamzeh. The mayor’s letter became the movie’s title.

In the following weeks, national media came. So did Hamzeh.

The result is a 75-minute movie, scheduled to premiere in November at the American Film Institute’s International Film Festival in Los Angeles.

The final cut was culled from more than 50 hours of footage, including archival film from CNN and WMTW-TV, original interviews and filming during the Jan. 11 twin rallies in Lewiston.

The sequence at the rallies – one for peace and unity, the other for hate – intercuts between neo-Nazis’ talk of “race mixing” and pleas for peace by people including Gov. John Baldacci and Attorney General Steven Rowe.

In interviews, former Lewiston mayors Kaileigh Tara and John Jenkins strongly condemn Raymond’s letter.

In the film, Tara calls Raymond’s letter “racist.” Jenkins says it helped the community “unravel.”

“It opened the gates of hell, as far as I’m concerned,” Jenkins told Hamzeh in the days before the rallies.

Hamzeh also interviewed some of the hate activists, including David Stearns from the World Church of the Creator. Stearns talked about his hatred of his multiracial stepfather and of Arabs spreading diseases in the United States.

Hamzeh, a native of Syria who speaks English with a slight accent, was questioned about his own nationality.

“I told them I was from France,” he said. “I didn’t think they’d believe me, but they did.”

Raymond, too, is in the film, though he never agreed to an interview.

“He refused every single attempt,” Hamzeh said. “He shut me out completely.”

So the filmmaker used archival footage from the local TV station, which interviewed Raymond shortly after his letter was published.

“I wanted to get his side of the story,” Hamzeh said. “But eventually I started to feel like the Somalis. He wouldn’t talk to them, either.”

Hamzeh could talk to the Somalis, though.

He speaks Arabic. It allowed him to talk with the Somalis in their own language. As an immigrant who moved to the United States 20 years ago, he empathized with their newcomer status, he said.

He knew Lewiston, too.

In 2000, Hamzeh shot a low-budget film about kickboxing, “Shadow Glories,” here in Lewiston. He became friends with Tara and Jenkins.

“I fell in love with Lewiston,” Hamzeh said.

He wants people around the country to know more about Lewistonians than the narrow perception created after the letter was published, he said.

However, that will depend on how the film is distributed. Until now, it has been shown only to a few small groups of friends and to some industry people.

Hamzeh hopes to get the film onto network television. The story, he said, is a microcosm for immigration all over the world.

The film ends with footage of Raymond, answering questions about charges of racism levied against him and his family’s adoption of two African-American children. Raymond cries and becomes unable to speak.

“I wanted to do justice even to the person people blamed for this plague,” Hamzeh said. “People from Lewiston taught me.”

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