Sunday, July 20, 2008

Iraq in Fragments


It's not true. Doc-a-Day is not dead. It's just been sleeping while I worked my fingers to the bone finishing up two contracts while starting a new project. Finally, in this brief window between work and vacation, I've managed to watch a film.

I'd long been meaning to see Iraq in Fragments, which I missed at Hot Docs and during its theatrical run. And so, when reader Contessie mentioned it in a comment last month, I figured it was time.

Directed, photographed, written and scored by James Longley,
Iraq in Fragments is an anthology film - three stories, from three different parts of Iraq, documenting the impact of the war on people from three main groups: Sunni in Baghdad, Shia in Sadr City, and Kurds in Kurdistan. The three segments are united primarily by Longley's remarkable cinematography. The first thing you notice is the super-saturated colours - everything is more vivid, more intense than you expect. But that's not the most important thing. The camera roams the streets, constantly shifting point of view from observer to participant. It's as if, in the midst of the chaos, it's impossible not to be a participant.

The style is particularly effective in the first segment, a profile of an 11-year-old boy who works at an auto repair shop in Baghdad. This is a near-perfect short film in itself: intimate, full of surprises and remarkable access. The camera is in the middle of the action, seemingly invisible to the participants, who never give any sense of playing to it. The boy speaks only in voiceover, a technique from the days of film that's sadly little used today, when tape is cheap and all interviews have both sound and picture. The drama is as much in the contrast between what the boy says and what we see happening. Longley clearly stuck around long enough to become part of the scenery. The camera is just there; the boy, his boss and the men who sit around drinking tea and talking politics seem to just go on with their lives, oblivious to it.

Part 2 takes place among the followers of Shia cleric Mukhtada al-Sadr, known as the Mehdi Army. The strength of this piece is the access. Longley gets amazing footage of a nighttime self-flaggelation parade, but even more remarkable is a raid by a group of armed, masked thugs on a street market, where they beat and arrest everyone they suspect of selling alcohol. The scene is punctuated by the constant sound of gunfire - it's terrifying. Later, the wife of one of the arrested men pleads for his release, her child crying from hunger. And all of this is on camera. But on the whole, this segment doesn't work as well as the first one, mainly because there's no central character. At the beginning, a man tells his story in voiceover. We think we'll see him soon enough, but we never do. "Is it him?" we wonder every time the camera settles on a new person... but we never find out. Other voices appear and disappear, but we never really get to know anyone. Longley is a distant observer in the Shia community; it seems like he never got close to anyone, although they let him witness some amazing things.

The third segment, in Kurdish territory, starts off beautifully -- two boys, best friends, playing together and dreaming about the future. Somehow, the scene reminded me of Satyajit Ray, who had a way of capturing the languor and innocence of childhood just before things get serious and ugly. But again, as soon as Longley veers away from the boys, the segment becomes confused and unsatisfying. There's an election. But what does it have to do with the story of the boys? Eventually, he brings the story back to the kid who will never get to medical school... but not as elegantly as he might have.

On the whole, Iraq in Fragments is an incredible achievement, both for its cinematography and the access Longley was able to get. I'm looking forward to seeing Sari's Mother, the fourth chapter of Iraq in Fragments, which he turned into a stand-alone short.

One more thing, to answer Contessie's question in the comments to the previous post. The reason this film works with three separate stories is that Longley doesn't try to interweave them. Each stands alone, and the filmmaker doesn't try to mess around with parallel storylines, segues, etc. The effect of the three stories is cumulative - and, for me at least, this works much better.