Iraq in Fragments
Directed by James Longley
HBO Documentary Films/Typecast Releasing
2006
Rating:


There has been no shortage of Iraq documentaries since the war began in 2003. However each has been received with profound indifference. Audiences recently warmed to "An Inconvenient Truth", but documentary fans seem to have turned apolitical in the wake of the muckraking "Fahrenheit 9/11," preferring films about penguins, young ballroom dancers and spelling bee champs to the Iraq films by Robert Greenwald ("Uncovered: The War on Iraq," "Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers") or the troop perspectives of "Occupation: Dreamland," "The Ground Truth," "Gunner Palace" and "The War Tapes." To be fair, most of the Iraq War documentaries have been cinematically indigent despite their importance and incendiary perspectives, employing talking heads and a vιritι style where the soldiers frequently film the action themselves using handheld digital cameras. Most of these films seem doomed to be forgotten, even though "Occupation: Dreamland" (about troops in Fallujah), "The Ground Truth" (which tells the story of troops returning home from Iraq) and Greenwald's fact-finding deserve to be remembered.

If any of these documentaries is to endure like the Vietnam-era "Hearts and Minds," it deserves to be "Iraq in Fragments." Director James Longley — working without the aid of the military or the asylum of the cushy American safe zone the "Emerald City" in Baghdad — embedded himself with the people of Iraq to make his film. He spent months talking to his subjects before finally filming them to tell the disparate reactions of Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds to the American occupation.

The result is not only intimate reportage but visually poetic. Longley's cinematography captures the harsh beauty of Iraq as it's consumed by fire and violence, his rigorous editing encapsulating the chaos of the country. His images work as a companion piece to Werner Herzog's Gulf War documentary "Lessons in Darkness" in its shots of flaming oil fields and Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" in its rhythmic editing and scenes that depict the menacing omnipresence of American helicopters.

Refusing to take a political perspective of his own, Longley allows his Iraqi subjects to speak for themselves — something that has rarely happened since 2003 — for a humanistic and impressionistic portrait of the country.

In the first section "Mohammed of Baghdad," Longley follows Sunni Mohammed Haithem, an 11-year-old Oliver Twist figure whose father disappeared during Saddam Hussein's reign and who has been semi-adopted by his boss, a mechanic. Mohammed's story is especially devastating as it details his hopes of being an airplane pilot in contrast to the reality that he has spent five years in the first grade and still hasn't learned to spell his father's name. In voiceover Mohammed speaks of his boss as being a loving benefactor even as Longley films the man casually beating the boy for minor infractions. Longley finds a parallel in this to the Hussein dictatorship: the men who frequent the garage remember Hussein with near nostalgia, especially given their current situation.

"Sadr's South" documents the rise of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in Nasiriya and Najaf as seen through the eyes of the pensive young Sheik Aws al-Khafaji. Though all of the Iraqis vent their rage and grief at the American occupation, the rhetoric of al-Sadr and his followers is the most vitriolic. "They came to teach us Western democracy," al-Khafaji says. "Killing, displacement, torture and arrests without charge — this is the democracy they have brought." The Shiites take advantage of Hussein's overthrow to exhibit more fundamental devotion through flagellation and to arrest men for selling alcohol during masked raids, not unlike the ones led by American soldiers in search of insurgents.

The examination of the Kurdish north in "Kurdish Spring" seems serene by comparison. The pastoral setting features friends Sulieman and Bizhar, sons of shepherds and brick makers who want to go to school to "be something" but who are reluctantly accepting they have no choice but to follow in their fathers' footsteps. This region seems closest to being at peace, yet the Kurds fear they will be punished for allowing the Americans into Iraq and that any hope for a stabilized future will come at the expense of a unified country.

"The future of Iraq will be in three pieces," Sulieman's father says. With heartbreaking hope, a confused child doubts this claim, asking how Iraq would be divided in such a way: "With a saw?"

Posted Saturday, January 20, 2007

Link to this review:
http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/film/iraq.in.fragments