User reviews

My opinion in a nutshell: it was definitely worth seeing. Lots of great shots inside three incredibly different regions of Iraq, and the film captures many normal Iraqi citizens discussing US occupation and various daily matters. Not surprisingly, there are practically no women shown in the movie.

There is no narrative, and, for better or worse, no insight into the differences between the Sunni, Shia, and Kurds.

It's nice to see the real people of Iraq, as opposed to the terrorist caricatures created by sensationalist news snippets.

In terms of the footage, it appeared to be a mix of film and DV, with good quality the most part with some soft and muddy shots here and there. For the situations captured, the quality of the footage actually seems quite good.

Check it out if you get the chance...

Longley's visually beautiful and emotionally saddening film in three parts, shot during two years spent in Iraq between the immediate aftermath of the invasion in 2003 and 2005, arouses tremendous hopes but ends by quite dashing them. Longley is great with a camera and patient with children and his documentary is full of lovely, yellow-filtered images. But the project to describe post-invasion Iraq is both over-ambitious and reductive. Longley wants to cover what he thinks are the three main divisions of the country -- Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd. But he tries to do this by reducing his focus to children and old people, speeches, and a few scenes of public violence, and the result feels empty.

Most memorable, because most integrated and most eloquently narrated (by the wispy, childish voice of the boy himself), is the first segment about eleven-year-old fatherless Mohammad (his father disappeared after speaking up about Saddam at some time in the past), who lives and works in the Sheikh Omar district of Baghdad. The camera is close up on Mohammad's sweet, expressive young face; or his voice-over declares, "Baghdad used to be beautiful" over shots of the city before the invasion (Longley made a short visit in 2002) and then, "the world is so scary now" as we watch big brown helicopters sputter threateningly overhead.

We never see Mohammad at home, but Longley hung out at the little auto repair shop where Mohammad was working long enough to fade into the tool racks and, astonishingly, to film uninterrupted Mohammad's encounters with his sometimes affectionate but more often abusive boss -- who smacks him and calls him a son of a whore for playing marbles with other boys; for not knowing how to spell his father's name; and finally for even spending time at school, which he is forced to give up to keep the job.

The boss also speechifies a bit about the occupation, which he considers far inferior to the days of Saddam: we can't help seeing this fat bully as a little Saddam lingering on in the Sheikh Omar district. Other voices are cut in throughout the segment with Baghdadis, presumably Sunnis (since that's meant to be the focus of this section), declaring the same things: the Americans just came to set up a military base, they're here for the oil (Mohammad says that too), they have not brought democracy, it's even worse now than under Saddam, everything they say is a lie.

Desperate for a father, Mohammad murmurs repeatedly that his boss loves him but in the end admits he has to escape the abuse. The rationalizing over, he leaves to work at his uncle's larger shop. He may still have his dreams of becoming a pilot and flying to more beautiful countries. Earlier, we watched him at school looking bright and eager as the teacher drilled the children on the words "dar" (house) and "dur" (houses) and how to use them.

Did Mohammad get to go back to school and learn how to write "Haithem" (his father's name)? We don't know, nor do we see his new workplace, or hear from relatives. Why did Longley focus so much time and attention on this boy? There's something heartrending about his little story, but he can't be seen as the future of the country. Alas, he has little future. This picture of Baghdad is vivid, but incomplete.

Parts two and three focus on Moqtada Sadr, Najf, and the movement to empower the Shiite majority and bring religious rule to the country; and on a sheep-herding and brick-making family in Kurdistan. Longley and his interpreter Nadeem gain access to the Moqtada camp through one of his men, thirty-two-year-old Sheikh Aws al-Kafaji, who let them film his activities, strategy meetings, rallies, marches, speeches, religious ceremonies, and an alcohol raid on the local market. There's even footage of a hospital, with a wounded man on a stretcher yelling, "Is this democracy?" "Amrika 'adu Allah," someone declares -- America is the enemy of God. Most noteworthy is footage of Sadr's men (or Kafaji's?) roughing up random people in the market suspected of selling booze and of encounters of Sadr's men with Spanish troops around the Imam Ali Shrine. The rest is a chaos of images, vivid and intense enough, but -- despite clear translations in subtitles of all the speechifying and excerpts from committee meetings -- without any sense of what it all may mean. No doubt about the fact that a lot of this material was dangerous to shoot, and again, Longley's camera-work is superior; this section will serve as excellent stock footage for future historical documentaries of the period.

Things became so dangerous that by September 2004, Longley decided to go north -- Koretan, south of Erbil, a small community of farms and brick ovens. From here on, no more Arabic is spoken, only the Kurdish language. After all the tumult of the Shiite uprising, Longley reverts to a smaller canvas, again focusing on boys, two close friends this time, so intimate they walk hand in hand to school, and their fathers. Mostly we see one of the boys, "Sulei" (Suleiman), an unsmiling youth with a chiseled face who wants to be a doctor, and his aging, bespectacled, chain-smoking father, a shepherd. Sulei talks about struggling to study his hardest to go into medicine, but again, the demands of supporting his aging dad and working both at baking bricks and tending sheep force Sulei to drop out of school -- even sadder than the case of Mohammad in Baghdad, because Sulei had a real desire to be somebody. The picture is the opposite here. Someone mentions Saddam's massacre of Kurds in the Eighties and moving in of Arabs, and the old man says, "God brought America to the Kurds." Quite a contrast to "America is the enemy of God." But again, a lonely boy without a future is no picture of the Kurds.

This documentary, shot shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein, offers some remarkable footage of everyday life in post-war Iraq. What is suffers from slightly is its desire to work as art rather than documentary - there are a lot of fast moving montages, separated from the words of the people being shown, and often they're beautiful and striking; but you find yourself wishing that the film would slow down, and let you form a more definite, precise impression of the world being depicted. Equally, any of the three "fragments" of this film could easily have made a documentary in itself, and while exposition may be a the crime in fiction, I would have liked more of it here - who are these people, and what exactly is their position? But in spite of this, I still enjoyed the film, as an evocative glimpse into lives rarely seen; and knowing that things have got worse not better since it was shot, it's a heartbreaking glimpse as well.

Constructed entirely of footage shot on the ground in Iraq after the fall of Saddam, this film is structured in three separate parts. Part one follows the child Mohammed at work and at school. Part two focuses on the south of the country with Muqtada al Sadr's radical Shia movement. The third and final part of the film focuses on life in springtime in the rural north of Iraq where the Kurds are dominant. The effect is not strong and flawed in equal measures but in different regards.

I'm normally accused of over-thinking things when I write and more often, being negative in picking up small things to criticise so I will be positive and focus on the good here. First and very much foremost is the footage captured by Longley. It is unbelievable to think that he has had the guts to go into these places with his white skin and film them; being embedded with US forces is one thing but cutting out and around is by far another. He gets us right into the heart of the people's lives and it is impacting to be riding in a car and see helicopters all around in the sky – very much different from the world that many of us will be used to. In this regard the film is worth seeing but I gotta say that there are plenty of films and such with really good footage of Iraq – even if some moments of this film are more than a match for them.

What makes for a strong documentary then is the whole package, not just the footage and I'm afraid that for Iraq in Fragments it is a case of "close but no cigar". The reason I say this is that Longley doesn't produce convincing stories or manage to pull everything together in such a way that he takes his viewer with him. There is something to be said for letting the viewer "experience" Iraq but even if you take this as the whole, I didn't think that the characters were strong enough to make a solid frame for this experience and the impact is lessened apart from some great specific moments. Longley doesn't help matters by utilising quite arty shots and montages as well – maybe increasing the flair and style of the film but the technique contrasts badly with the majority of the film, which has its feet firmly on the ground. It is a shame because the film constantly reminds you that this level of access is impressive but the film just seems to be all about the fact that the viewer gets this access – not producing a point, making an impact, informing or challenging.

I'm not sure if Longley just didn't get footage that he could work with or if it all just failed to come together in the editing room but one way or another it just isn't as good as it should be. Overall then it is impressive for its footage and its "experience" value but outside of this it is not that good and there are other documentaries that tackle the subject of life in Iraq under US rule with much better overall packages than this film delivered. Good but not good enough.

This is a compelling and insightful portrait of Iraq in the moments after Saddam has fallen. I approached this film without knowing much of its historical context but still found it absorbing, but I felt that I ought to know much more to really appreciate it. The technique for characterisation is fantastic, all the more amazing on what was presumably a very small team - if that? - and shoestring budget.

The few characters selected to form it drift in and out of view giving the sense that there are many more like them in the crowd but that none will be quite the same...We first approach the scene through the eyes of a child who has at some point lost his father and his sense of melancholy mixed with carefreeness being that young speaks volumes about the minute effects of a catastrophe of this nature and the failure of the American/British 'liberators' to fill the void left by Saddam. Has mood in spades

Iraq in Fragments is a documentary film directed by James Longley. Longley shot the film in Digital Video on a Panasonic DVX100 mini DV camcorder. The film premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival where it won three awards: "Directing Award Documentary", "Editing Award Documentary" and "Excellence in Cinematography Award Documentary". The film is also a part of the Iraq Media Action Project film collection. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The film was shot in Iraq and edited at 911 Media Arts Center in Seattle. This film has three parts to it which describe the viewpoints of Sunni, Shi'ite, and Kurdish residents.

War Criminal George W. Bush Occupied,plundered and devastated Iraq and unfortunately was not impeached or punished!. What A Shame!.

There are a lot of documentary films about Iraq now. Most of them are about US soldiers in Iraq -- and that's fine. But those films are really more about the US experience than about Iraq as a country.

What IRAQ IN FRAGMENTS does is show the country, the people, that the US has occupied. And it does so with such beauty. I have never seen such a gorgeous documentary as this. The cinematography will knock your socks off. And so will the access Longley has to his film subjects, which is amazing. It's almost like the camera is totally invisible, floating in the air around the people in this film. When the lights came up I was sad; I just wanted it to keep going. Watching this film is like being placed inside Iraq, like magic.

John Langely somehow created amazing shots all the while risking his life daily in a war zone where white skin can be a death sentence. I recommend this film not just to the documentary crowd, but to anyone interested in the Iraq war. Sometimes the shots are so breath-taking you don't believe it's reality, it is too perfect, even beautiful. I would have called this film, Iraq in people, because thats what I saw in this film, an intimate, very personal look at the struggles of people, who live in a war. The relationship between the boy(Muhammad) and his boss is hard to watch. The boy admires him like a father, but the man puts him down often and with no visible regret when he breaks the boy down because he can't spell his father's name after 4 years of school.

Let me just say right from the start that I came to this film not expecting much. I saw some other Iraq films like Gunner Palace and wasn't too impressed, but this one is totally new. First of all, the whole thing takes place from the POV of Iraqis - and I mean *really* from their POV - like almost looking out of their eyes. I have never seen a documentary that gets this close to its characters, both physically and emotionally, but where the camera stays invisible the entire time.

This in itself feels like an innovation when you're watching the film, but beyond that there is the kinetic editing and the absolutely gorgeous photography. So what you get is a film of substance that not only shows you a reality we never get shown on TV, but a documentary that feels like a true step forward in style. Documentary film makers are going to be playing catch up now that films like this one are out there.

Iraq in Fragments is James Longley's "fly on the wall" documentary looking at the in transition Iraqi society broken into three parts and three points of view. 11 year old orphan Mohammed in working class Baghdad; fanatical Shias led to attacks on the mainly Christian liquor sellers by an Islamic cleric; and a Kurdish point of view around Arbil.

Aptly titled, the documentary has no familiar cohesive structure that audiences are used to seeing. We're in the midst of a great uprising of the documentary and many of the "rules" of genre are being thrown out the window. This has been, for the most part successful. But for Iraq In Fragments the filmmaker's goal may have been as simple as "Let's go to Iraq, and then just roll tape". Unfortunately this means leads to the same end; a scramble of confused parts that while sometimes breathtaking and always eye opening are simply detrimentally flawed when attempting to convey a clear picture of the situation in Iraq.

The big redeeming quality here is the unique and jaw-dropping photography of the state of Iraq which fully immerses it's audience at the street level. Helicopters above, soldiers beside. Sadly, with the exception of a few short sequences, the subtitles draw your eye from the image to the bottom of the frame and keep you worried you're missing something important.

The overall feeling that does come across is that to the Iraqi -no matter Shiite, Sunni, or Kurd- the opinion of the occupation is summed in a quote from the film; "They took away one Saddam and brought us one hundred".

Iraq In Fragments is now playing at the Uptown Stage & Screen.

C Matt Watterworth http://www.theweal.com

This documentary does what no other film I've seen has been able to accomplish: It shows the world of real Iraqis on the ground. In breathtaking photography we are guided through three different "fragments" of life in Iraq, in Baghdad, the south and the north of the country. What emerges is a portrait of beauty and complexity, revealing aspects of Iraq and the effects of war and occupation that we never see in this country. But the film is not overtly political, and is difficult to pin down. Instead of being an opinionated political essay like the work of Michael Moore, IRAQ IN FRAGMENTS sticks to the idea of showing the situation without adding political commentary and opinions from the filmmaker. We never hear director James Longley's voice in the film, but we see the world of Iraq through his perceptive camera work and patient skills as a documentarian. This film is truly unique, a work of stunning cinematic quality, both current and timeless in its themes.

This is a documentary about three Iraqis. The first is a Sunni boy who works and goes to school in Baghdad. The second is a Shiite religious figure in a city to the south. The third is a Kurdish boy (and his family) in the north.

I've seen a lot of documentaries and cinema verite, but this one is one of the most successful. It's as if the camera is invisible, and the photographer got access to whatever he wants. Any documentarian is going to be jealous of this one. I could give many examples. One of the more chilling is the Shiite vigilante raid on the town's market, in which they beat up and kidnap fellow Shiites for the sin of selling alcohol. How on earth does an American get access to that? He actually climbs right into the trucks with the masked militants and films the whole thing from beginning to end.

And the result is spectacular. There's this Iraqi fellow sitting on the floor, surrounded by men with guns, his hands tied and a bag over his head, and he makes the comment "What's changed since Saddam? I've done nothing and I'm still sitting on the floor with a bag over my head!"

When we move up north to visit the Kurds, we see a brick factory where men are making mud bricks, just as they have been doing for many thousands of years. This is clearly not Nebraska, and anyone who invades a country like this, even with the most altruistic of motives, clearly has no idea what Iraq is about. Whatever the American foreign policy mistakes, military and political mistakes, the bottom line is we lost totally the small window of opportunity we had to turn Iraq into a democracy.

most docu films I see are less than exceptional in terms of cinema style. this is an exception. in Iraq in Fragments you get both the revelation of Iraq's reality from within society and also the eye of a true filmmaker. exceptional, beautiful work of cinema art and a very important documentary film. i think this film will be a landmark work in future years.

this film is returning to something like the time when images were more important than text/language. in other words, this is a film that uses CINEMA language to speak with. it is truly unusual this way, not like any documentary in i saw in a long long time. maybe this is a new direction for documentary film. i hope so.

A brilliantly made documentary, the first about Iraq that focuses exclusively on the people of that troubled land, rather than on the U.S. military occupation forces. The title is a triple entendre. We know that the country has been fragmented from its beginnings after WW I as a stitched together confederation of disparate Kurd, Shia and Sunni territories. Iraq was, of course, further fragmented as a consequence of the recent U.S. invasion. The title also refers to the cobbling together of fragments of footage shot at different times and places to create this film.

James Longley shot nearly 300 hours of film over a two year period, from April, 2003, to April, 2005. He has edited his material to produce a series of three stories, film fragments skillfully arranged to show us differing perspectives. Part I is set in Baghdad, and is Sunni slanted. Part II is set primarily in Naseriyah and features the radical Shia movement led by Muqtada al Sadr. Part III is set in the north, in rural Kurdish country.

Longley permits the people who live in these places to tell their own stories. There are no expert talking heads, no editorializing voiceovers. Youngsters as well as adults have their say (though every speaker is male; Longley says he has footage of women that could become the focus of another film). We venture into schools, marketplaces, religious and political rallies.

It is evident that only the Kurds here consider the American presence beneficent. But the only Shia element that is given voice here is the most anti-American, al Sadr's group (in Part II). We know that among the larger Shia majority, opinions about the U.S. are to some degree more variegated. It almost goes without saying that the Sunnis, the group most closely affiliated with Saddam's reign, is almost unanimously anti-U.S.

The artistry of Longley's film is breathtaking. His cinematography is first rate, with marvelous use of close-ups of people from imaginatively conceived camera angles, sometimes against distant scapes. One scene shows just hands and forearms of people in a crowd as they are reaching up for pamphlets: it is a stunning image.

The footage is high resolution with vivid coloration, except for several minutes of grainy footage with poor light quality near the end of Part II. The editing and sound are also wonderfully realized. While someone is talking, the camera drifts to images that complement or supplement what the speaker is saying. The film won best documentary awards at Sundance 2006 for direction, cinematography and editing. All well deserved. (In Kurdish, Arabic & English) My grades: 9/10 (A) (Seen at the Portland (OR) International Film Festival on 02/23/06)

While the cinematography is stunningly gorgeous, I found "Iraq in Fragments" to be mostly very disappointing, a shallow rehash of stereotypes of the 3 main sections of Iraq.

First we get a little boy who's failed the first grade 2 or 3 times and professes to be loved and well-cared for by a boss who is rough and bullying to him, behavior that would be clearly labeled as abusive in the US. Granted in a much harsher, more violent society little Muhammed may be relatively well-off. But this roughness, the constant low-level violence and the threat of much worse, the cycle of failure and nostalgia for Saddam Hussein (Yes, he was terrible, but now is so much worse, they all say.) is simply what we already "know" from western press reports from the Sunni Arabs.

The Shi'ite segment shows rough "justice" as suspects in a minor crime are kept imprisoned in blindfolds by what appears to be a vigilante squad. Here we see the prayers, processions, funerals, self-flagellation – oh, those exotically religious Shi'ites! And the Kurds are shown as struggling to develop democracy. The little boy who is the focus has auburn highlights in his hair, showing these Kurds to be more western than the Arabs. Montage shots of boys in a field recall Eisenstein, images of youthful dreams of building a new future.

The visual lessons of Eisenstein are much displayed here with wonderful montages, and the composition of this film alone makes it well worth watching. It is one of the most beautifully shot movies I've seen in a long time. Still, the content seems to be so much western hand-wringing over Arab violence, and the eventual dismemberment of the country (implied in the title) and hope for Kurdish democracy. (And here is the simplistic emotional uplift that softens the rest of the film.) The aesthetics of the movie are seductive and one can feel the visual poetry as being somehow more than that. Alas, it isn't. While the close presence and some of the time spent with individuals, particularly the young Sunni Arab and Kurdish boys, provide a sense of personal intimacy, they reveal no depth or complexity to the situations they live in, or any sense either of what holds Iraq together or what's tearing it apart. The framing of these three sections offers a sense of boundary and inevitability, objectifying the subjects, telling us nothing new about them or their situation, and encouraging distance and complacency among western viewers.

Well, I finally found the very best documentary from 2006. This exploration of Iraq is reminiscent of the beautiful ethnographic documentaries (and faux-documentaries) of pioneer Robert J. Flaherty. The images are awe-inspiring and completely indelible. The film is broken into three parts. In the first segment, we follow the life of an 11 year-old Sunni boy in Baghdad. The second depicts Shia Muslims in Southern Iraq, particularly the followers of Moqtada al-Sadr. And the third follows a Kurdish family in Northern Iraq. Unlike Flaherty's documentaries, Longley's film is entirely real. The man spent two years wandering Iraq by himself with a camera starting in April of 2003, less than a month after George W. Bush famously declared that major military operations were complete. He's a white man, and it's stunning that he was able to infiltrate these people and film them on such an intimate level. The first and third segments probably held their own danger, but the second segment is especially impressive. How in Hell was Langley able to accompany Shi'ites as they kidnapped alcohol-peddling shopkeepers? It's mind-boggling. This is a rare documentary that is both informative and incredibly cinematic. As a whole, I think Iraq in Fragments comes pretty close to being a masterpiece. There's a silhouetted sequence of some Kurdish kids burning a tractor tire that is one of the most gorgeous shots I've ever seen. Definitely one of the best films of 2006.

This is stunning film.

Although perhaps it would have had more impact seeing the film right when initially released, when the conflict in Iraq was near its peak of violence, the documentary still offers a highly unique look into the Sunni, Shia, and Kurd conflicts. This is the ultimate slice of life documentary that delves straight into the everyday lives of Iraqis. Its goal isn't to offer some kind captivating narrative, nor to offer any kind of political commentary. It moves at a slow, tranquil pace, loosely structured in three chapters. The filmmaker, James Longley, stays as detached and neutral as possible, yet his camera is always strikingly up close and intimate with his subjects. There is no narration, allowing the people being filmed to fully tell their stories. The craft on display comes from the editing, which is highly stylized -- however, save for a few moments where it was overly jerky, the editing is in my opinion masterful and gives the film such a unique feel and rhythm that I haven't found in any other documentary. This might be a stretch, but at times while watching I felt like this is the kind of documentary that Terrence Malick would make. It's that cinematic! Needless to say, I also thought it was visually stunning.

I imagine many will be turned off by Longley's technique here, but I think if you're in a mellow mood, the film can slowly take hold of you and let you become immersed in the setting and the people's lives. The film offers nothing more than a look into the struggling lives of Iraqi citizens, dealing with foreign occupiers, adjusting after years of oppression, and trying to survive in an intense civil/religious war among each other. We witness their every day lives, the mundane and constant struggle of it all. We listen in on their conversations and interactions. We see them in both happy and sad moments. Ones of despair and chaos. We see brutality and bloodshed. Some have called this film boring, but I found it a very unique, at times fascinating, and always intimate portrait of a great human struggle.

This is an essential film for people interested in the conflict or documentaries as an art-form.

The most important thing lacking in my understanding of the problems in the Middle East and Iraq in particular is knowledge about the people and their beliefs. This film provides a tiny peephole into what drives Iraqis and what they feel is important. A very revealing aspect of the film is how Muslim religious leaders are able to get followers to exact justice upon those who don't agree with their religious beliefs. An incident where market vendors who are accused of selling alcohol are abused and kidnapped makes is easy to see how Iraqis, driven by religious zealots, can perpetrate such atrocities. Overall, this piece of work is amazing for its ability to get close to the everyday Iraqi and to give the viewer an unbiased glimpse of what life is like for them.

Getting pretty tired of these conservatives taking cheap shots at Michael Moore every time they review a documentary. It's as if they're obsessed with the guy ever since he exposed their lies. In this film, however, Longley wanted to get up close and personal, and the cinema verite approach he chose lends itself perfectly to putting the viewer in the lives of his subjects. In the first segment, Longley follows the depressingly hopeless existence of young Mohammed Haithem, an 11-year-old boy living in the heart of old Baghdad. Mohammed's father has disappeared, he lives with his grandmother, and seesaws between struggling to get an education, where he is four years behind and struggling to learn to write his name, and working as a shop apprentice to help support his family.

Longley's lens captures Mohammed's gloomy neighborhood with dismal clarity -- the poverty, the frustration of the Sunni population at the sudden rise in power of the majority Shia, long repressed by Saddam Hussein's Baathist government, who are gaining power and control for the first time in years and making it difficult for the Sunnis to find work. Somber men play backgammon and talk bitterly about the United States only wanting Iraqi oil. "We don't care about the oil," one man says. "Why don't they just take it and leave us alone?" Rent it, buy it, watch it. It's worthy.