Iraq in Fragments (NC) <!-- none onestar twostar threestar fourstar fivestar -->

The last thing Iraq needs is another opinion about Iraq, and American documentarist James Longley mercifully doesn't offer one in his blistering portrait of the country. Following the bleak double-meaning of its title, Iraq in Fragments is broken into three stories. The first concerns an 11-year-old boy who works as a car mechanic in Baghdad; the second focuses upon the religious militancy of the Mahdi army and its support of the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr; the third visits a Kurdish family in the north, among the few to rejoice at the American occupation.

Longley has somehow made himself invisible to his subjects, and he catches extraordinary moments of reflectiveness and violence.