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The ravages of war and occupation: an interview with James Longley.

Article Excerpt
James Longley met acclaim early on in his career, when he won a Student Academy Award for his short documentary, Portrait of Boy with Dog, produced while he was a student at the VGIK film school in Moscow, Russia. Intent on making his first feature documentary before he turned thirty, Longley bought a ticket for Tel Aviv in 2001, headed to the Gaza Strip, and wound up remaining there for a few months. The resulting film, the powerful and haunting Gaza Strip (2002), courted controversy with its pointed, damning depiction of the Israeli occupation of the titular stretch of Palestinian land--so much so that it still cannot be shown on public television in the U.S.

Therefore, one would have expected Iraq in Fragments (2006), Longley's ambitious documentary about the Iraq War, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival to great acclaim, winning three closing night awards, to be similarly fiery, given its provocative subject matter. And indeed, Iraq in Fragments, through its tripartite structure focusing on Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish Iraq, portrays a nation that has been ripped to pieces through conflict. Yet, although it does not lack for passion, the film proves to be more complex in its understanding of politics: Longley portrays a complicated nation full of contradictory ideals and interpretations, a society trying to cope with the constant threat of violence. Stylistically, the film is also quite different from Gaza Strip's staid, mournful polemic.

Iraq in Fragments displays dazzling cinematic technique, with Longley's furious cutting and hectic camera movements providing an esthetic corollary to the ever-shifting reality of war. And it doesn't end there. A more recent film, the twenty-one-minute Sari's Mother, created from footage shot for an episode of Iraq in Fragments that didn't make it into the finished film, recently premiered at the Toronto Film Festival.

Despite the shared genesis, Sari's Mother, which tells the story of a rural mother of seven trying to get compensation from Baghdad's bureaucracy for her AIDS-stricken son, is a far more lyrical work than Iraq in Fragments, with even more narrative drive and a pervasive melancholy that suggests a filmmaker constantly looking for new ways to engage with his subject matter.

Cineaste: When you first went to Iraq, did you have any idea what you'd find there?

James Longley: I wasn't sure what I'd find. The first time I went, it was with Congressman Jim McDermott, who helped lead a group of independent journalists there in 2002, prior to the invasion. Of course, he was terribly reviled for it at the time--he said...