Iraq in Fragments: Critic Reviews

Working with verite patience and no scripted narration, Longley looks and listens, with nonjudgmental sensitivity, as Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish Iraqis explain their colliding, intractable, invaded worlds, and their rising frustrations.

James Longley's haunting, oblique film, Iraq in Fragments, presents a collage of images, sounds and characters in an intimate, partial portrait of an unraveling nation.

In a series of stunningly filmed sequences, Longley and his camera seek out the real lives outside the frame of conventional TV news, and he succeeds in creating both compelling journalism and superb images.

A vivid, poetic evocation of life in post-invasion Iraq that works both as impressionistic collage and candid portraiture.

James Longley's Iraq in Fragments is a visually stunning documentary that looks at that country through the eyes of its own people -- a novel enough approach at a time when everyone else has had their say.

When the war is long gone, this deft construction will persist in relevance, if not for what it says about the mess we once made, then as a model of canny cinematic construction.

Visually arresting and deeply disheartening, James Longley's impressionistic documentary explores the pain of a shattered country by homing in on a few tiny shards.

A documentary of stunning immediacy and marvelous images...

In the end, the movie is more than the sum of its fragments. The montages are intense, the images ravishing. The movie is tactile. When you finally feel this place, you understand just how little you understand.

A remarkable example of the conjunction of a burningly topical and newsworthy subject with a brilliant filmmaker.

Documentary filmmaker James Longley (Gaza Strip) has a flair for cinematography and editing and a poetic sensibility that informs both these talents.

The struggles [documentary filmmaker James Longley] recorded in his dazzling Iraq in Fragments aren't battlefield conflicts, but the personal, religious and political efforts of Iraqi citizens to reassemble their shattered lives.

James Longley's devastating documentary Iraq in Fragments has neither narration nor obvious political ax to grind, but it manages to tell us something about Iraq that we aren't getting or can't get from standard news coverage.

Brings back nothing journalistically substantial from the war front.

The film is unusual among Iraq documentaries for its impressionistic, frequently gorgeous cinematography and for its structure: It's split into thirds, one about a Sunni (the boy), one about a Shiite mob, and one about the quiet Kurds up north.

Because [director] Longley uses a technique that forgoes interviews and voiceover commentary in favour of observation and revealing juxtapositions, his movie puts you both in the chaos and just above it.

Stands up as a classic war documentary, in its unusual poetic form and by its extraordinary access to the lives of ordinary Iraqis.

It's head and shoulders above the rest in its clarity, intimacy and poetry, and it illustrates the dreadful predicament America has created in Iraq, which drove so many angry people to the polls on Tuesday.

The frequently gorgeous footage, culled from some 300 hours shot over a two-year period, provides ample compensation for any narrative.

... this one demands to be seen.

Visually, the director's flair is impressive. But Longley's clear intention of using children's faces to better tug at our heartstrings would be more admirable if it didn't feel as shamelessly staged.

Too bad James Longley couldn't have broadcast this insightful documentary immediately after he shot it in 2003 and 2004.

Bafflingly, the threats in an occupied country consistently come from within, not without or overhead: what has the effect of the US occupation and Hussein's vicious rule been on these people? Offers a fragmented, obscuring picture of Iraq.