From Gaza to Iraq: James Longley By Hannah Eaves February 2, 2006 - 5:19 AM PST "After the war, it was complete anarchy." In November, GreenCine's Hannah Eaves spoke with John Sinno, co-producer of Sundance Documentary competitor Iraq in Fragments. A measured and touching film, Iraq in Fragments shies away from sensationalism to tell the story of the widening fragmentation of Iraq through the eyes of its people. The three segments, dealing roughly with the three largest religious-political factions in Iraq, seem at times like a fictional film, the camera is so absent and the framing so thoughtful. Such touches were rewarded at Sundance where Iraq in Fragments has just picked up prizes for best Documentary Directing, Excellence in Cinematography and Documentary Film Editing. It's been a long road for director James Longley, who spent two years in Iraq. Hannah Eaves sat down with him at Sundance in the days before his first public screening. You've made two films about the Middle East now, Gaza Strip and Iraq in Fragments. When did you first become interested in the Middle East? How did that interest come about? I don't really have any reason to be interested in the Middle East except that it's the most important international story happening right now in the world for the United States. Some people would disagree, I'm sure. There are people who think that China is the most important [story], but the Middle East continues to be extremely significant for a lot of different reasons. For people in the United States, it's also extremely misunderstood. People in the United States don't know very much about the Middle East and there is a lot of very simplistic, two-dimensional media that comes out. As a consumer of media I found that a bit frustrating and I really wanted to go to the Middle East myself and to see it myself and develop my own ideas about what was happening and really know, so I wouldn't have to take anyone's word for it. I wouldn't have to rely on what was being printed on the front page of the New York Times about the Gaza Strip because I would have been there and I would have seen it myself and I would know. You can infer then what the situation really is. And how was it when you arrived for the first time? You must have had a jumping off point. I decided I would make my first feature documentary before I turned 30 and so on my 29th birthday I bought a ticket to Tel Aviv and got on a plane and took a taxi down to the Gaza Strip, and that was that. When I went in, it was the beginning of January 2001, and it was raining and cold and not at all like you'd imagine the Middle East to be in movies! The Middle East of our imaginations, right? As you go into the Gaza Strip through the Erez crossing point, which is at the north end of the strip, there are these long spaces of concrete barriers, these spaces the size of large parking lots where you are just kind of walking by yourself to get to the next checkpoint. There's just nobody and nothing around. It's the strangest thing. Nobody tells you which way to go. I accidentally went off to the right thinking that was the way I should go into the Gaza Strip and wound up at the gates of an Israeli military base, where they nearly opened fire on me because I was walking along with these huge bags, you know, and they didn't speak a word of English. But luckily they spoke Russian, because of course, the soldiers are from Russia, and so I explained myself to them. But once inside the Gaza Strip, people were very nice and helpful and it was only a few days before I kind of had my feet on the ground and I found a translator, a fixer, to work with. I continued working with him through the entire film. In fact, at the start of Iraq in Fragments, I also worked with him. He went with me to Baghdad before the war. There are many similarities between the two films - there's no omnipresent narrator, you're telling the story through the people who are there, through their own experiences. You also choose again to see the situation through the eyes of young boys. If I were a woman director, for example, I would probably not choose to have male kids as subjects in the film, necessarily. There's a big division between the genders socially. I found that the easiest way and the fastest, most efficient way to get inside the culture was, (a) through the eyes of a child and (b) through the eyes of a man. In Iraq I tried a number of times to hire women translators to work with me so that I would be able to have female main characters in the film and I was unsuccessful. One woman I spoke with said, "Look, I'd be very happy to work with you, but my family would object and I could work with you in this city," where she was, "but I wouldn't be able to travel with you, and I certainly couldn't spend the night outside with some man." So there are these considerations that are just there and in the culture. That was in the more liberal part of Iraq, which is the Kurdish region up north in Sulaymaniyah, which is the most liberal city in Iraq. Women go uncovered and you can buy alcohol in stores right on the street; there are bars, it's the most liberal place, and still, it was impossible for her to have this working relationship, even there. In Baghdad it was much worse, and in the south, while I was in Nasiriyah and Najaf, you know, I can't recall even ever having a conversation with a woman. So these kinds of cultural considerations really play a heavy role in the decisions you make in terms of the practicality of putting together a documentary film. Adults in general usually have more of a problem being followed around by some guy with a camera, not for one day, and not for one week, but for maybe a year. Most adults in the United States or anywhere else would have a problem with that; it's not an easy thing to get that kind of access. With children, it's far easier. Far, far, easier. Do you ever get concerned that they will exaggerate things because they are young? Well, in the first place, I don't necessarily rely on the child narrators to be the only source of information about political opinion and things like that. In this film, and in the last film, there are a lot of different people who are speaking their mind on critical issues. But also, children have a tendency to soak up what's around them, and I don't think they have as many filters as adults do about expressing their opinions and saying what they think, or even saying what they think they think, as they may not really have considered things in-depth. As an audience member, you're able to understand that they're kids and they're looking at things from that perspective. You know, not only are children a lot easier to follow than adults, but they also happen to be characters that it's much easier to relate to, I think. If you are taking the audience into a foreign culture, a foreign country on the other side of the world, something that is very new and strange to them, I think it helps psychologically if you do it through the eyes of a child because they can then see things as a child, where the world is new and everything is strange and they haven't experienced everything yet. I think it has another connotation - the future of the country is going to be ruled by people who are young men right now. There are differences between the generations but there but there's no real cultural divide in most cases in the way that there might be here. The cultural divide happens not along generational lines but along other kinds of divisions within the society - class, education, these kinds of things. It was a very depressing aspect of Gaza Strip. All these young children that are already so entrenched in hatred. They've never known a normal life. Or to put it a different way, their normal life is a life of military occupation. Similarly, in Iraq, anyone who is now in their 20s has grown up with war and that's the only thing that they've known. The Iran-Iraq War, all of the political repression of the Saddam regime, constant bombings throughout the 90s, the sanctions which completely brutalized the population of Iraq, and then now another war, and another occupation, so this is again a situation in which a large number of people grow up knowing only this life of war and hardship. Stylistically there is a great deal of difference between the two films. Gaza Strip feels very "vérité," but Iraq in Fragments is much more polished. The first section in particular makes you feel like you're almost watching a fictional film. The storytelling is so strong, the camera placed in the right way... I decided consciously that I wanted to make a film in which the camera didn't feel as though it was so present - where you weren't paying that much attention to me. In order to get that effect and still have it be a real vérité film, not a film with actors and scripts and so on, you just have to spend more time and shoot more material. That's all it is. That's why Gaza Strip was made in three months, the shooting period, and Iraq in Fragments was shot over a period of two years. So there is a huge difference, and the difference comes from my commitment to keeping not only the content but also the formal and the stylistic aspects of the film consistent throughout. Was that something that you learnt directly from making Gaza Strip, then? Was it a matter of, "Okay, this is what it's like when I shoot for three months, the next one I want to be different so I'm going to go for two years"? Well, there are a couple of different reasons. First of all, I like to shoot films probably more than I like to edit them and finish them, although I like to edit also. I did a lot of editing before I came back from Iraq, actually, while I was still there. I would be editing on a notebook computer in my hotel room and that kind of thing. As long as I was producing it myself for the shooting period and no one else was telling me what to do, as long as I had money coming in, I could just sort of continue. It was easier for me to continue working and filming and getting all this great, beautiful material that I really liked than it was to sort of face up to the fact that I actually had to come back and edit it at some stage. So you were procrastinating? I was procrastinating, but I was procrastinating by working on the film. The same thing happened on Gaza Strip. I had to be forced out of the Gaza Strip by the fixer I was working with. He basically told me after three months, "Look, you have 75 hours of material, you have good stuff, it's enough to made a movie, you have to leave, you're taking more and more risks all the time and it's time for you to get out and finish your film, because if you don't do it no one else is going to." [laughs] So, it was the same situation with Iraq in Fragments. I basically had to find other people to co-produce with me who would convince me to come back and finish the movie. Because it's much easier for me to stay and work in Iraq than to come back to the United States. But obviously things were very dangerous and they got, do you think, progressively worse while you were there? Absolutely. In the beginning, of course, under Saddam Hussein, things were very safe for journalists. There was zero danger. The only danger at that time, before the war, was that you might be accused of being a spy or something. Or you said the wrong thing; then you probably would be asked to leave the country, more likely than that you'd actually be locked up or something. Whereas, after the war, it was complete anarchy. There was no government. Whereas I could walk alone by myself at midnight down the back alleys of Baghdad and not have too much trouble before the war, after the war that situation changed entirely. Anybody could do anything. The society was held together only by the tradition of the relationships between people - neighbors, neighborhoods - people who knew each other. The social fabric of Baghdad in particular is what I'm talking about. It was just held together by those things that were there beyond government control at that time. But as a filmmaker, of course, it was quite liberating because before the war you needed to have permissions to sort of go out of your hotel practically, let alone film anything. But after the war no one told you what to do, or where to go, or who to see, or who you could talk to, and anyone could say anything they wanted. It was a completely different situation - completely different, within the space of a month. So suddenly you have a country which has been closed off for decades, where documentary filmmakers hadn't been allowed to work freely during the upsurge of documentary filmmaking. Iraq had sort of remained this big dark area no one had really gone in and made feature films about. I think Iraq produced two or three films of its own in the last twenty years - something like that - very few films were made. next >>> Index "After the war, it was complete anarchy." "It's going to be bad, whether we stay or whether we go." back to articles

Hannah Eaves Originally hailing from Australia, the home of greatly-missed Victoria Bitter and the 'laid back life,' Hannah is currently based in San Francisco. Her writing can also be found in SOMA Magazine, The Santa Cruz Sentinel and Intersection Magazine, which she co-publishes with Jonathan Marlow. February 6, 2007. Mark Savage & the D.I.Y. Aesthetic by Jeffrey M. Anderson February 3, 2007. Seeing the Humor in Sexual Identity by Michael Guillen January 29, 2007. Smokin' Aces with Joe Carnahan and Jeremy Piven by Sean Axmaker January 26, 2007. Include Me Out: Interview with Farley Granger by Jonathan Marlow January 25, 2007. Grindhouse: Chapter Four - The 1960's by Eddie Muller January 19, 2007. Charles Mudede: Zoo Story by Andy Spletzer January 19, 2007. Mark Becker: Merging the Personal and the Political by Sara Schieron January 19, 2007. Micha X. Peled: The Lives of the Sweatshop Youth by Hannah Eaves January 16, 2007. Djinn: A Taxi Driver Dreams of Perth by Jeffrey M. Anderson January 12, 2007. Clint Eastwood: Flags and Letters From the "Good War" by Jeff Shannon view past articles