“But pointing the camera need not always involve pointing a finger. James Longley’s Iraq in Fragments is the latest entry in the crowded field of documentaries from that war. It is also one of the best, partly because it is more concerned with exploring daily life and individual destinies than with articulating a position. The title has several meanings, referring both to Mr. Longley’s collagist method and to the communal fractures that threaten the country’s stability. It takes the form of a trilogy, with one section devoted to Sunnis, one to Shia and one to Kurds, but it also reminds us that we generalize about those groups at our peril. Whether you think the war is right or wrong, Iraq in Fragments is a necessary reminder of just how painful and complicated it is.”
–A.O. Scott, The New York Times

One “of the strongest documentaries this year…both poetic and reality-based.”
–Kenneth Turan, The Los Angeles Times

“…It has no overt political agenda, nor does it have a narrator. In beautifully shot, almost poetic images, it takes us inside this fractured country, letting us feel what its like from the inside from three points of view–Sunni, Shiite and Kurd. Longley spent years in Iraq, and he lets his subjects, and his images, speak for themselves…The title refers both to the style of the film and the political fragmentation that threatens the countries future. A fascinating glimpse of an Iraq the mass media never shows us, the movie is a quiet revelation.”
–David Ansen, Newsweek

“Iraq in Fragments is a stunningly beautiful film that lets the Iraqi people speak for themselves as they tell us what the war has done to their daily lives. What this movie shows, you will never see on the evening news.”
–Michael Moore

“Political filmmaking is an evergreen in Sundance’s documentary competition, but two standout works complement each other powerfully in their emphasis on the local effects of national and international policies. Overseas, James Longley’s mesmerizing “Iraq in Fragments” shakes off the oversaturated video vocabulary that has defined media coverage of the war-torn country and brings a cinematic beauty, both terrifying and ethereal, to the landscape. Broken into three sections that examine Iraq geographically, Longley focuses on the microcosmic experience, whether it be a young child, a radicalized adult or a wizened old man, to reflect larger truths about war and peace.”
–Stephen Garrett, IndieWire

“… a gorgeous tone poem drawn from about 300 hours of incredibly privileged footage—the cameraman literally rolled out of cars during firefights to avoid bullets, and captured more unfamiliar emotional violence in the life of a young Baghdad boy whose ostensibly kindly surrogate-father employer keeps threatening to ‘roast him alive.’”
–Tim Appelo, The Seattle Weekly

Sundance Standout: Iraq In Fragments
Logan Hill, New York Magazine

There’s a gold-rush mentality in many of the documentary films coming out of Iraq right now, as filmmakers race overseas to make their movies and then hurry back home to make their names. It’s an understandable urge in the face of such opportunity—and even sometimes a commendable one in the face of such danger. But what makes James Longley’s Iraq in Fragments so powerful—and why it’s likely to be one of the most-heralded films at Sundance—is that he spent enough time there for unpredictable ideas to incubate and shot enough footage to explore them. From 2002 to 2005, Longley (Gaza Strip) filmed an Iraq that you likely haven’t seen before.

Mirroring the way post-invasion Iraq has splintered, he splits his own film into detailed thirds, tracking a young kid in Baghdad, two brick-baking Kurdish families in the north, and the Shiite movement of Moqtada al-Sadr in Najaf. Each is composed with a sharp, vérité eye, narrated only by its subjects, and rendered with an intimacy that we haven’t seen since, perhaps, the Oscar-winning Born Into Brothels. Without editorializing in any obvious way, the film delineates how very differently Iraqis regard their country’s future, from Sadr-acolyte outrage to an old farmer’s exhausted fatalism. And though Longley’s dramatic footage of a brutal militia raid on Nasiriyah liquor merchants and a violent clash with Spanish troops in Najaf is stunning, it is no less affecting than the quiet way that a boy’s apprenticeship to a crude Baghdad auto mechanic becomes an understated metaphor for life under Saddam’s reign.

More filmmakers should learn from Longley’s patience, as should more producers—it’s well worth the investment to fund long-term projects like this.