Triple award-winner at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival (Documentary Directing, Cinematography and Editing Awards), Iraq in Fragments is more than a singularly accomplished documentary film - it is an astonishing work of art. Culled from 300 hours of footage taken over a two-year period, and presented without scripted voice-over, the film is at once expansive and intimate, harrowing and transcendent.

Filmmaker James Longley's (Gaza Strip) documentary feature shadows ordinary Iraqi citizens in three crucial yet fractured regions - Baghdad; the Shiite south; the Kurdish north - as they struggle through a chaotic present and face a distant, uncertain future. In old Baghdad, buildings burn, U.S. tanks patrol, and an 11-year-old mechanic scurries amid the rubble to please his intimidating boss as neighborhood men angrily indict the Americans. Then, guided by a young leader in Moqtada Sadr's Shiite revolutionary movement, the film proceeds south, where political arguments ricochet across cafés and meeting halls, and young Shiite men take to the streets to enforce religious laws and stage an anti-U.S. uprising. In the northern Kurdish countryside, where smoke from brick ovens billows in the sky, a farmer, grateful to America for removing Saddam, ruminates on the future of his family and people while his teenage son tirelessly tends sheep and dreams of becoming a doctor. These indelible portraits, painted with strikingly beautiful vérité immediacy and poetic visual juxtapositions, humanize the conflict and illuminate the textures and tensions of a country wrenched by occupation and pulled in disparate directions by religion and ethnicity.

*Winner of the 2006 HRWIFF Nestor Almendros Prize.