In Kaz Rahman's new film of Muslims at prayer, the camera follows five women through the day as each pauses for prescribed prayer. From one who ritually washes in a paradisiacal garden pool, to one shopping in a crowded city to another bundled against ice and snow, each takes time for God.

"Salaat" -- Arabic for prayer -- debuts this weekend at the Melwood Screening Room in North Oakland, as Ramadan concludes with the festive holy day of Eid. The film will run at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and 3 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $7 for adults.

The film is contemplative but abstract and minimalist, with little dialogue.

"I'd classify it as an art film. It's not a how-to-pray film. It's not a documentary," said Mr. Rahman, who has taught film and video at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh since 2008. "It's not going to replicate the experience of salaat, but I want it to be meditative. ... I want the tensions and the stress of the day to be punctuated with this soothing atmosphere."

The film also isn't intended as a response to conflicts over a mosque near Ground Zero, a pastor's plan to burn Qurans or the chronological coincidence that caused Eid to fall the day before the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The lunar Islamic calendar cycles against the Gregorian calendar, so that Eid arrives about 11 days earlier each year.

Mr. Rahman, 36, a graduate student at City College in New York on 9/11, had already spent five years producing art based on traditional Islamic forms by that time. The attacks changed many things, but not his art, he said.

"Salaat" moves through the seasons and the prayer times of sunrise, mid-day, afternoon, sunset and evening. The locations aren't identified, though he has personal ties to some. The city is Hyderabad, India, where his father grew up and where Mr. Rahman once painted a large mural that can be seen in the film. The icy winter is in Canada, because Mr. Rahman is a native of Toronto.

"I'm a Muslim who comes from a snowy place. That is where I was brought up, so it was natural for me," he said. "But I also wanted to go for extreme juxtapositions in the scenes and seasons, because it makes it more interesting."

He wrote the script for "Salaat" in 2004 and shot it in 2007. He's been editing it since.

Though film isn't a traditional art form for a faith that goes back 1,400 years, it does draw on themes of traditional Islamic art.

That art is "very much about beauty and representing God's creation, but showing that beauty in an imperfect way because we are just human artists," he said.

"My main objective is for people to leave the theater thinking about what they just saw, and maybe still thinking about it two hours or a week or a few weeks later. I want them to be moved."

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