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Trailer for "Iraq in Fragments"

It wasn’t only Saddam’s imaginary weapons systems that sent Americans into the invasion of Iraq. It was ignorance of Iraq itself, and of its people.

James Longley’s Iraq in Fragments is a densely compiled series of close-ups of this country and its ravaged, riven people. In his own way, Longley modestly redresses the vacuum of comprehension about Iraq, one that afflicted this country’s political elite—the Dick Cheney crew and its propagandistic accomplices—as they misled America into war.

Not that Longley intended to document or inform in a conventional sense, or to instruct. He has made what might have been entitled “Aspects of Iraqi Life,” but his documentary isn’t representational in the tradition of informational efforts. It’s a subjectively framed and propelled film essay on Longley’s reactions to the strife and dislocation and new social formations of post-invasion Iraq. He somehow insinuated himself into positions of access to life on the streets, in the homes, meeting rooms and informal associations of a variety of Iraqis. This alone is a remarkable accomplishment considering the usually restricted ambit of American and European correspondents in the dangerous conditions of that country.

Longley, who photographed the film himself, has obviously taken care to select material reflecting the major cultural and political divisions in Iraq between Shia, Sunni and Kurds. But what he did with each of the three sections of his film is different in style and content from anything else you’re likely to have seen.

In the first part, “Mohammed in Baghdad,” he tracks incidents in the daily life of an 11-year-old Sunni boy whose tenuous life is a product of the American military presence and the brutal reign of Saddam Hussein before that. His father, a police lieutenant, disappeared into a prison years before, and he has repeatedly dropped in and out of school as he works to support his mother and grandmother. He’s apprenticed to an erratic, overbearing garage owner, a man the soulful-eyed, attractive Mohammed tells us is like a father: “He loves me like a son, and he won’t fire me.”

The sketchily but tellingly depicted events (we never encounter Mohammed’s real family) lead all too sadly to a new direction in the boy’s life. Mohammed is the most eloquent of the filmmaker’s subjects, not just in his hopeful and plaintive words, but in his gravely pretty face. Part One is vaguely neo-realist in its tone.

In the next section, “Sadr’s South,” Longley went among the Shiite followers of firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in Naseriya, in south-central Iraq, as they coalesce and begin to impose their religious regime and rules on the population. In one sequence, they beat and abduct alcohol merchants.

Longley captures these vehement, inflamed adherents planning to achieve dominance even as they deny the existence of any important conflict with Sunni or secular Muslims. Whether they’re delusional or insincere is left unclear.

As Bush and his military commander, General Petreus, try surging to control in Baghdad to the north it may be advisable to keep in mind the message of one Sadrist militant: “The South will not be silent. No American will be safe!”

Longley and his film end up in the northeast, in Kurdistan, to portray a situation that is an edenic compared to what has come before. Among these rural Kurds, social, family and patriotic bonds still hold. An adolescent, Suleiman, earnest, intelligent, but boyishly high-spirited, quits school to help his aging sheepherder father.

This section is misleading in the absence of any reference to the tension produced by the Kurds’ consistent yearning for political independence, and it’s in this closing section that Longley’s penchant for lyrically evocative and starkly expressionistic imagery becomes palpable. He often seems more engaged in creating textures than in recording details in the lives of his subjects.

But this busy, impressionistic portrait of Iraq under American occupation (the Americans make only brief, disconnected appearances) is also redolent of humanity in a threatened, truly fragmented country.