The earliest news stories about Steve Kurtz’s arrest proffered cinematic references to convey the intensity and surrealism of his situation. “A doomsday episode of ‘CSI,'” “Straight from the set of ‘E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial,'” “A slowly unfolding nightmare,” the stories said of Mr. Kurtz’s ordeal.

In 2004, Mr. Kurtz, an artist and professor of art at the State University of New York at Buffalo, called 911 when he awoke to find his wife had stopped breathing. When EMS technicians arrived, they found a houseful of biological materials, such as a sterilized form of E. coli, books on bioethics and genetic engineering, and windows darkened by tin foil. Mr. Kurtz, a leader in the practice of bioart, in which biological materials are manipulated for artistic endeavors, was planning to use the bacteria in an upcoming show at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

After summoning the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Joint Terrorism Task Force, officials arrested Mr. Kurtz on federal charges of violating the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act. He and the former head of the department of genetics at the University of Pittsburgh, Robert Ferrell, who had collaborated with Mr. Kurtz on several art projects and helped him obtain the cultures, currently face up to 20 years in prison.

Now Mr. Kurtz’s story is getting the treatment with which it has long been associated — it’s being documented on film. But his case is no simple matter, and “Strange Culture,” which opens in New York on Friday and can be seen tonight at a special screening at the Museum of Modern Art, is no simple film.

Because of Mr. Kurtz’s ongoing legal troubles — initial charges against him were rejected by a federal grand jury, then replaced by charges of mail fraud and wire fraud — he has been advised by his lawyer not to discuss the events surrounding his arrest. Because his wife, Hope, died of cardiac arrest the morning Mr. Kurtz’s house was raided, she cannot provide her side of the story. And because Mr. Ferrell is suffering from a recurrence of melanoma and the aftereffects of two strokes, he is unable to appear on film.

So filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson, whose films have appeared at the Sundance Film Festival and the Museum of Modern Art, put her years of adventurous filmmaking to use, and produced a project that challenges the boundaries of documentary filmmaking. Using testimonials, interviews, dramatic re-enactments, news footage, animated graphics, and donated amateur films of protests and other activities surrounding the case, Ms. Leeson spliced together a documentary that details Mr. Kurtz’s story, circumvents the pitfalls of his situation, and protects him from legal liabilities. When she started the project, the director said, she had no idea that Mr. Kurtz’s story would pose such challenges.

“I didn’t know until I started to make the film,” she said. “It took a while to get the permissions, and then he told me there were things he couldn’t talk about.”

After Ms. Leeson decided she wanted to proceed with the project, Mr. Kurtz added that he didn’t want anyone to play Hope, for fear that she would be mischaracterized. But he changed his mind when the actress Tilda Swinton, a favorite of Mr. Kurtz’s and a longtime collaborator of Ms. Leeson, expressed interest.

To work around her constraints, Ms. Leeson had to find “what we could put in the film that wouldn’t make things more difficult for him, but would communicate what his situation was.”

But once word of Ms. Leeson’s project got out, she discovered she had more help at her disposal than expected. Mr. Kurtz and his group, the Critical Art Ensemble, tended to be critical of public health and military programs, and after it was confirmed that Hope Kurtz had died of natural causes and that the samples obtained from Mr. Kurtz’s home posed no public safety threat, a grassroots network of artists claiming the case was politically motivated sprang up in his defense. His case even developed an international following; his supporters filmed protests, rallies, and fund-raisers — including one at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York in 2005 — held on his behalf.

“People started to send me footage from around the world,” Ms. Leeson said. “The cartoons from Canada, those graphic comics. People from Germany had shot some demonstrations. As the material came in to me, that’s when I started to use it to make the clearest story I could.”

Clarity, though, is in the eye of the beholder. Though Mr. Kurtz, who continues to teach in Buffalo and to mount bioart projects with the Critical Art Ensemble, is supportive of the film and confident that it won’t damage his legal case (“Strange Culture” has been vetted by Mr. Kurtz’s lawyer), he expressed unease about the multiple incarnations of his character in the film. After all, “Strange Culture” has a Steve Kurtz-heavy cast: There is the real Steve Kurtz; an actor, Thomas Jay Ryan, who plays Steve Kurtz; the animated Steve Kurtz, and the Steve Kurtz as captured on newsreel.

To Mr. Kurtz, however, such a fractured identity is not entirely foreign; in fact, it’s somewhat of a continuation of his reality for the past three years. “All these personas were being constructed in the media of who I was, and I didn’t identify with any of them,” Mr. Kurtz said of the initial news coverage of his case. “That’s true of Lynn’s film, too, but the narrative she constructs is very telling of the situation I’m in.”

Many of these difficulties could have been solved, though, if Ms. Leeson had simply waited until the conclusion of Mr. Kurtz’s trial, which is expected to convene in 2008. But the filmmaker felt the significance of Mr. Kurtz’s ordeal was time sensitive.

“The outcome is less important than the message,” Ms. Leeson said.

For his part, Mr. Kurtz seems to agree, and is less concerned with the Hollywood ending

“Other people had mentioned things like this before, but people wanted to wait until after trial to have a happy or tragic resolution,” Mr. Kurtz said. “But she said, ‘I don’t care. Let’s just talk about what’s happening right now.'”