The film that took home the most 2006 Sundance Film Festival awards was Iraq in Fragments, a gorgeous, impressionistic look at the troubled country from the inside out. James Longley played the role of producer, director, cinematographer, and editor for the film, receiving top Sundance documentary prizes for cinematography, directing, and editing. The lavish praise for Iraq in Fragments has continued during its festival run around the world. I interviewed the multitalented Longley after seeing the film at Sundance.

Click To Enlarge It took about a year before Longly was able to get Mohammed Haithem Majid comfortable enough to share his thoughts in audio interviews, which are used to narrate the film.

Digital Video: You had incredible access to your subjects. There was one scene in particular in the middle section of the film, where a Mehdi Army militia raided a market, looking for people selling alcohol. Before I knew it, we were in the room with these imprisoned merchants, who are blindfolded and have their hands tied behind their backs. It was an incredibly gripping scene because of the access you got. The same thing goes for the first and last sections of the film, and the intimate portraits of two young boys and their day-to-day lives. How did you get such great access to your subjects?

James Longley: In my experience, access has a lot to do with how much time you have. If you get off on the right foot with people and then spend six months or a year filming them, that's the key. It's like anything else in life where you have to develop a relationship with people and get to trust them and they trust you, so you can have that largely unfettered access to their lives.

In the scene with the alcohol sellers, I guess I was a little bit lucky. We showed up at the Sadr office in Nassiriyah just by chance one afternoon when they were getting ready to go on an alcohol raid. We had heard they were doing these things on and off, and had asked in passing if it would be possible for us to go on one. They sort of hummed and hawed and said, "Well, yes, I suppose...." But we never expected it would pan out. One day we found ourselves in the middle of them preparing to go out and do God's work, as they saw it, in Nassiriyah. These guys don't think of themselves as doing anything wrong--they're like the cops in Cops--they don't mind being filmed. They think this is part of the good work they're doing in the community to clean up the immorality in their society.

I pushed a little bit after they came back [from the raid]. I sort of wiggled my way into that room where [the prisoners] were being asked all of these questions and the money in their pockets was being counted. I was able to film that for maybe 20 minutes before it registered with someone from the Mehdi that it was probably not going to look great. By then I already had the material.

DV: That's one kind of access. Another type seems to be the way you worked with the boy in the first section of the film. He was shy and withdrawn. The fact that you got emotional access to him let viewers see Iraq through his eyes.

Click To Enlarge Mohammed Haithem Majid, the main character from the first section of Iraq in Fragments.

JL: Again, it's just a matter of time and whether or not he trusts you. It actually took about a year before he was really putting his thoughts out there in the audio interviews I was doing to make his voice-over narration. Periodically we would take him to the house of the translator and make this completely separate layer of work. In the beginning he was extremely inarticulate. He would say one thing and repeat it. He thought he was going to say something wrong--all of the problems you encounter with really shy people being filmed. Had I gone to Iraq with only a few months to spare to shoot this movie, clearly it would have been a completely different film. If you don't have the time, then I think you have to resign yourself to not having this level of intimacy with the subject, and it's just inevitable that you'll wind up making something more news-y and less interior.

Structure

DV: Iraq in Fragments comprises three parts, focusing on the Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish ethnic and religious divisions in Iraq. Did you set out to make the film with that structure in mind?

JL: When I went to Iraq, I'd heard this idea that Iraq was going to break apart along ethnic or sectarian lines--that idea had been floated by different people before the war-but I didn't anticipate that I was going to be making a film that would highlight those divisions or be divided along those lines. Many Iraqis don't think of themselves that way. It hasn't been the tendency in the past for most Iraqis--and I'm talking about Sunni and Shia, especially ordinary educated professional people--to first think of themselves as Sunni or Shia Iraqis. This is, in part, because the country has been one of the more secular societies in the Arab world in the twentieth century. So this idea that people's identities are going to be based along sectarian lines is inaccurate. In the 1970s, you would find people saying "I'm an Iraqi person" first, then saying "I'm Sunni" or "I'm Shia" second. But that has actually changed quite a bit, even in this short period since the war. Now you will hear people talking about this "us and them" mentality, and the society really is becoming more and more divided, and it's something that feeds on itself, which is unfortunate.

In my case, with the film, I had an idea that I was going to make stories in different parts of the country, and I started to do that. In fact, I started six different stories. You want them all to be a little bit different in some way--something in the city, something in the countryside, something in the north, something in the south. And once you start to do that you have this impulse to show the diversity of the country, and part of that diversity is the different ethnic groups, sectarian groups, political leanings, and so forth. The fact remains that this idea of Iraq as just Sunni, Shia, and Kurd is extremely simplistic and not even entirely accurate. Certainly, in a global sense, it does reflect the pure trends in a society, but it's also much more than that. First of all, there are lots of other groups in the country: Turkoman, Assyrians, and on and on and on, and they all have their own political aspirations, needs, and affiliations. But beyond that there are also divisions along class lines, urban versus rural, farmers versus urban professionals. There are divisions within the sects.

I guess my fear is that people are going to look at the film, this little 94-minute chunk of something that approximates the reality of the subject, and say, "Wow, I understand Iraq like I've never understood it before." But the truth is you still don't understand the complexity. You can live there for years and not understand the complexities of what's going on. But it's hard to get away from the impulse to show the breadth of the country, to show this complexity, and to give people a taste of that. That was one of my ambitions.

Click To Enlarge James Longley directed and shot Iraq in Fragments, and also had a hand in producing, editing, and sound/music for the film.

Making Iraq in Fragments

DV: You mentioned you started shooting six stories. What were the other three you didn't use?

JL: In addition to the three in the film, there's one I'm working on right now, which is about a woman who lives in a poor Sunni farming town south of Baghdad called Mahmudiya, which has become known as one of the more dangerous places in Iraq since I was filming there. There are nine kids in the woman's family--seven boys and two girls--and one of the boys, who is 10 years old, is suffering from AIDS, which he contracted under the Saddam regime from a blood transfusion. He's one of the only juvenile AIDS patients in Iraq. The story is about the woman and her battle to get health care and compensation from the system, going up against the Ministry of Health and navigating the system of hospitals and doctors and the center for infectious diseases.

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At the same time, it shows life on the farm and her political background. I worked on that for 9 or 10 months, but in the end I had death threats against me and the family because I was an American. The area is an insurgent hotbed, and they were just looking for someone to oppose. I had to stop filming, but I still have enough material to make it into a complete film. The problem was that it didn't fit into the larger [Iraq in Fragments] movie. No matter how we tried to square the circle, it didn't seem to fit with the other chapters. In the end we decided to cut it, much to our chagrin, because it means there are no strong women characters in the entire film.

In addition to that story, there's a project I was working on to document the Anfall campaign of 1988--the genocide campaign against the Kurds at the end of the Iran-Iraq war when Saddam Hussein and his people decided they were going to eliminate the Kurdish villages up in the countryside, particularly around Sulimanya. It was a strategic move, because they were trying to eliminate the support for the Peshmerga--the Kurdish fighters who were hiding in the mountains and who would come down and get supplies from these villages. What's Saddam's answer--to wipe out these villages. They took 100,000 to 150,000 people to death camps and killed them, and burned their villages. Not that many people in [the United States] know about that--everybody's heard about Halabja and the gassing, where 5,000 people were killed in 1988, but that was just a small part of a much larger campaign. It's essential those kinds of things are preserved. I went from village to village interviewing people. Most of them were survivors of that campaign. Because this piece is more historical and really a different kind of documentary filmmaking, it's not included within the bigger film. It could be a separate film or a special feature on a DVD.

There was a third section where my little sister, Margaret Longley, and I filmed in a women's shelter. I felt a complete absence of women in the film. It sticks out and after a while for me it's unpleasant to watch a movie with holes, where half of the population is basically invisible. On the other hand, if you're a guy in Iraq, especially in the south in the more conservative areas, that's really the way things appear. You won't have any kind of social contact with the opposite gender--it's just not done.

As a male filmmaker, this is tough. There are people like Laura Poitras, who did a really good film called My Country, My Country. As a woman filmmaker she has a lot more opportunity to have access to women characters as well as male characters, because as a Western woman she can kind of play both sides. As a Western guy, basically, I have to have a really good excuse to film women. Either they have to be the mother of someone who's dying of AIDS, or it has to be a specific project dealing with a women's shelter where most of the women there are running away from their families who are trying to kill them. Trying to film ordinary women and ordinary life is extremely difficult. I followed a woman who was trying to get a divorce from her husband for years, and failing. Unfortunately, I don't have the most crucial scenes because I was called away to film during the Shiite uprising, at exactly the time she was going through the climactic courtroom scene. So that didn't make it into the film either.

Click To Enlarge Followers of Moqtada Sadr at a rally in Kufa Mosque, from the middle section of the documentary.

Translating fragments

DV: You don't speak Arabic--how did you handle translating the footage?

JL: Well, you can't edit the footage unless you've translated it, so it's the first step in postproduction. I edited everything on Apple Macintosh computers in Final Cut Pro. I had a 17-inch G4 laptop with me and between 2 and 2.5 TB of hard drive space with big LaCie 500 GB drives. I digitized 200 of the 300 hours of material. I would go through the material with a translator sitting next to me. I'd turn on the timecode overlays and then set up text documents with the number of the tape and translate them sentence by sentence with timecode. It was all done in hotel rooms, and it wound up being a little less than 2,000 pages of translation. It took a long, long time, and I worked with many different people on it.

[As we were talking, I recommended a new shareware app called InqScribe, which lets you play/pause and transcribe QuickTime movies all within one application. InqScribe also lets you play movies back at variable speed and enter timecode addresses with keyboard shortcuts. Check it out at www.inquirium.net/products/inqscribe/.]

DV: Did you cut footage while you were in the field?

JL: I would cut certain scenes I was champing at the bit to edit, especially scenes where there was no dialog. For example, I cut the alcohol raid scene shortly after I filmed it. I translated all of the material for the first chapter long before I left, so that was what I worked on first. I cut a 45-minute version, and that's what I used to apply to the Sundance Institute for a production grant.

DV: How did editing footage in the field--as opposed to a traditional offline edit after you shot--affect what you shot later on?

Click To Enlarge Mahmoud, a Kurd from the film's third section.

JL: I wouldn't have it any other way. When you're editing at the same time you're shooting, it lets you see what you have, what you don't have, and the strengths and weaknesses of your material. Maybe you need to go back and film additional stuff to help you out in the edit. It lets you begin really visualizing how the whole film can come together while you're still filming it.

On the other hand, not everybody has the kind of schedule I was working with. I was in Iraq for two years. If you're filming for two years and you're not editing, what are you doing? You have a lot of free time--there are huge blocks of time where production isn't happening, where you're just waiting for things to change. So you wind up with a lot of downtime in shooting, and you should be editing. If you're not translating and editing and logging your material, you're probably just wasting time.

Click To Enlarge Attendees at a funeral for Mehdi Armyfighters in Najaf, Iraq.

Iraq in Fragments opens its theatrical run November 8, 2006, at the Film Forum in New York City, followed by a limited national release. For more information on the film, including haunting audio clips, go to www.iraqinfragments.com.

Gear Used Production Panasonic DVX100 and DVX100A cameras (shooting 24p Advanced, letterboxed) Sony ECM 678 microphone Rycote Softie windscreen TRAM wired lavalier mic Postproduction 17-inch Apple PowerBook G4 Apple Power Mac G5 LaCie 500 GB and 1 TB drives Final Cut Pro 5 Logic Pro 7 Adobe Photoshop

Collaborators Final Dolby Digital surround mix at Bad Animals Studios (Seattle) on ProTools Final HD color correction at Modern Digital (Seattle) on a da Vinci 2K File-to-film recording at Alpha Cine Labs (Seattle)

Credits Director James Longley Producers John Sinno James Longley Editors Billy McMillin Fiona Otway James Longley Camera James Longley Post coordinator Basil Shadid Sound/music James Longley 2nd unit camera Margaret Longley Re-recording mixer Dave Howe Colorist Bill Lord Translators Ahmed Ayed Ali Zekki Dler Hashim Duler Bojan Istifan Braymok Mohammed Mohana Mustapha Hasan Nadeem Hamid Reyal Sindi Zaid Al Rawi Zaid Fahmi Zirak Dilshad

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