Documenting life during wartime
By Paige Parker
Nov. 19, 2006 9:00 p.m.
“People who work in the conditions of war are very
special.”
Or so says UCLA documentary film Professor Marina Goldovskaya,
referring to James Longley, director of the documentary “Iraq
in Fragments.”
Winner of the Sundance Film Festival’s awards for Best
Director, Best Editing and Best Cinematography, Longley’s
“Iraq in Fragments” opened in Los Angeles on Friday at
the Nuart Theater. Longley spoke in Goldovskaya’s class on
Tuesday to a crowd of enamoured students.
Also the director of the 2001 documentary “Gaza
Strip,” which features the lives of Palestinians in Gaza,
Longley was pleasantly surprised with the success of his film.
“If you get your film into the festival, as far as
I’m concerned you made it,” he said. “And
anything else is icing on the cake, and I really did not expect it
to do as well as it did.”
The new documentary film focuses on the lives of ordinary Iraqi
people and the economic, religious and political turmoil that
divides them into fragments. Longley spent two years, from 2003 to
2005, in Iraq gathering 300 hours of footage and 1,600 pages of
transcribed and translated text for the film.
“I hope that my students will learn (from the film) that
they have to take very difficult universal issues, and they have to
do everything they can to help our country to move on,”
Goldovskaya said.
“Iraq in Fragments” is not a war documentary, and,
according to Longley, it was never meant to be.
“In this country we don’t have a lot of opportunity
to see what Iraq is like on the ground from the point of view of
ordinary Iraqis, and I hope the film gives people that
window,” Longley said. “My job in making the film was
to convey the views of the people that I was filming and the world
that they were living in.”
The film focuses on fragmentation in every sense of the
word.
“The whole society is breaking into pieces and no one
knows what to do,” Longley said.
“It’s this kind of low-level civil war all the time
and yet people are still trying to carry on with their ordinary
lives.”
The fragmentary structure of the film also mirrors the content.
It’s divided into three distinct stories, with each tale
focusing on a different individual or group of individuals as they
carry on with their daily lives amid the chaos of war.
“(Iraq’s) defining characteristic is that it’s
a country on the brink of disillusionment of fragmentation,”
the filmmaker said. “It made sense to film in different parts
of the country and to see this kind of fragmentation in
process.”
The first fragment follows 11-year-old Mohammed in Baghdad as he
struggles between pursuing an education and working to support his
family. The second is the most political, following protestors in
Shiite cities and men beaten under suspect of selling alcohol in
the streets. The final section involves a peaceful Kurdish family
and its hope for the future.
“Iraq is probably the most stressful place in the world.
… You are always thinking that you may in fact really be
killed,” Longley said.
Longley, who also serves as the film’s cinematographer,
editor and composer, attributed much of his film’s success to
his patience and elongated stay in Iraq, which allotted him the
time to cautiously acquaint himself with the surrounding
community.
“When most people might shoot an entire documentary,
I’m just getting to know them,” Longley said.
“That’s the way to avoid problems, being a
foreigner, is that you have to let them know what you’re all
about and let them make a separation between who you are and
whatever possibly bad feelings they may have about the United
States.”
Instead of focusing on the extraordinary circumstances of the
war, Longley emphasizes the seemingly ordinary life of those
affected by it.
It is when tears trail down young Mohammed’s face, Shiite
activists bow their heads to the ground in worship, and Kurdish
children engage in a lighthearted snowball fight, that the intimacy
between Longley and his subject matter becomes wholly apparent.
“You can feel the tension,” Goldovskaya said.
“You can feel the people’s lives.”
