Dir:
James Longley, 2006, US/Iraq, 94 mins, subtitles
Cast: Mohammed Haithem, Suleiman Mahmoud
Review by Kevin Gill
American filmmaker
James Longley has chosen an apt title for his documentary
Iraq in Fragments, not least because the film offers a
devastating portrait of a nation divided into religious,
ethnic and ideological factions and shattered by social
and political instability. It refers, too, to Longley’s
technique in assembling over three hundred hours of footage
collected over two years following the US-led invasion
in February 2003: he has chosen a rhetorical, often lyrical
approach ungoverned by an over-arching thesis and has split
his film into three very distinct segments, each one offering
a different story about modern-day Iraq.
Longley, a skilled documentarist with
previous experience of filming in an occupied territory
(his first film Gaza Strip was a similarly intimate account
about Palestinians living under Israeli rule) has talked
about his need to become “invisible” to
get the material he wanted - that’s just about the
only way you can account for some of the remarkable footage
he shoots for the film’s second part ‘Sadr’s
South.’ Here, by sticking very close to an influential
cleric Sheik Aws al Kafaji, Longley documents the embryonic
stages of a ferocious Shiite uprising led by Moqtada Sadr,
which culminates with a martyrs’ funeral after a battle
with Spanish troops. We are flies on the wall at meetings,
speeches and ceremonies before witnessing at close quarters
a raid on a market by armed Sadr followers and the subsequent
beatings, arrests and interrogations of suspected alcohol
sellers. “I suffered this under Saddam and now I’m
suffering it again,” shouts one of the blindfolded
detainees in a disturbing scene that reinforces an earlier
interviewee’s claim that it is poor working men who
bear the brunt of authoritarian regimes.
The political thrust of this reportage
contrasts starkly to the personal portrait that forms the
film’s opening
segment ‘Mohammed of Baghdad.’ The subject here
is an 11-year-old boy Mohammed Haithem, whose voiceover attests
to the emotional hardships suffered by children in the hostile,
war-ravaged capital. “It was beautiful. Now it’s
scary, so scary,” says Mohammed, looking up anxiously
at circling helicopters. As if the turmoil of invasion and
occupation were not enough, the boy is torn between his own
education and the need to support his grandmother by working
as an apprentice to a local car mechanic. Longley claims
he just hung around Mohammed’s workplace until he became
part of the furniture and this has enabled him to assemble
a poignant vignette that draws something like the emotional
response of a neo-realist drama. The heart melts as we see
Mohammed striving to please his boss, a tyrannical little
man who frequently slaps the boy on the head, subjects him
to a tirade of verbal abuse and taunts him about his failure
at school, but the story ends on a note of quiet triumph
when Mohammed gets a new job where the people are nice and
he no longer gets beaten.
Children also feature heavily in the
film’s final
segment ‘Kurdish Spring’, set amidst the relative
calm and serenity of a small farming community in Iraqi Kurdistan.
The bare landscape and mountainous backdrop allow Longley
to frame his most arresting images: a huge plume of black
smoke from a brick-firing oven fills the air (reminding viewers
of the tumult elsewhere) and a gaggle of children play in
fields of wheat, silhouetted by the evening sun’s orange
glow. We hear two boys talk about friendship, work, education
and future hopes, while their fathers speak of more universal
concerns – elections, greedy leaders and the prospect
of an independent Kurdish state.
Thus another ingredient in Iraq’s ideological melting
pot, but neither here nor elsewhere does the director challenge
or embellish his interviewees’ testimonies with overt
editorialising (Longley doesn’t enter the frame of
provide a persuasive voiceover in the manner of Michael Moore
or Nick Broomfield). His project is only political inasmuch
as it offers an alternative representation of modern-day
Iraq to that depicted in the mainstream media, giving ordinary
citizens the platform to talk openly and at length about
their own lives and the state of their nation. If there’s
one tentative conclusion to draw from Iraq in Fragments it’s
that women – a group conspicuous by their almost total
absence from a dense film whose abiding images of people
talking, listening and acting all involve men – might
hold the key to the country’s uncertain future.
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