James Longley Movies

In his nonfiction film Sari's Mother, the Oregon-born documentarist James Longley returns to some of the same thematic ground covered by his heavily-lauded 2005 work Iraq in Fragments. But whereas that earlier picture offered three revealing sketches of post-Saddam Arabic life, Sari offers only one. The narrowed focus enables Longley to capture the same humanist empathy and intimacy inherent in Fragments (most evident in the first segment of that picture), but delve deeper. In Sari, Longley visits an Iraqi mother grappling with attempts to care for her AIDS-stricken son during the United States occupation. The director captures her inspirational hope and optimism in spite of increasingly dire circumstances. In the process, he also creates one of the few multilayered documentary portraits of an Arabic woman in existence. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi

Filmmaker James Longley offers three thumbnail sketches of Iraq as the nation struggles to its feet following the American Invasion in this documentary. In the film's first chapter, Mohammed Haithem is an 11-year-old forced to make his own way in Bagdhad after the disappearance of his parents. Mohammed earns his keep working in an auto-repair shop, though he would prefer to go back to school, and has developed a precocious cynicism about the presence of U.S. troops along with a fear of the ongoing battles between Sunni and Shia forces. Elsewhere, the struggle of the Kurdish people of Iraq is personified in a handful of people working together on a farm, where they tend crops, make bricks, and look to their blighted past as well as hoping for a brighter future. And the fundamentalist Shiite cabal of Moqtada Sadr is profiled as they travel from Najaf to Naseriyah, promoting government based on a strict interpretation of Muslim law. As Moqtada Sadr's military cadres enforce the rule they have set down, they clash with American soldiers, further dividing an already polarized populace. Iraq in Fragments was screened in competition at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi