"Director James Longley profiles three lives—a fatherless boy in Baghdad who cuts school to take a job and support his family, a patriarch baking bricks in Saddam-devastated Kurdistan, and a cleric in the Shiite fundamentalist movement in Najaf (a truly impressive feat for a community suspicious of the West)—in his impressionistic portrait of Iraq's Sunni, Shia and Kurd communities. It would be easy to describe the intimate and provocative look at life for the citizens surviving day to day under occupation as a portrait in conflict, but it's really an illustration of regionalism becoming insular in post-Saddam Iraq as cultures close in on themselves. Longley's sensitive eye for imagery and graceful camerawork, and the vivid, color-saturated video-to-film transfer...gives the film a beauty and a richly textured palette rarely seen in such video documentaries." (Seattle Post-Intelligencer) "Documentaries dealing with the Iraq war are as numerous as those proverbial sands of the desert, but...this one demands to be seen. The unprecedented three documentary awards [it] won at Sundance—best director, best editing, best cinematography—is an indication of one of the things that makes this film special. For James Longley...is a filmmaker with the kind of impeccable eye we are not used to seeing in works like this, someone who has a pictorialist's sense of the power of imagery....[He] knows exactly what details to record. Drawn from more than 300 hours of footage, the film's all too brief 94 minutes mesmerizes with its insight and, rarer still, its beauty." (LA Times) Cosponsored with Cornell for Peace and Justice. more at iraqinfragments.com
2006, color, 1 hour 34 minutes, USA/Iraq