Iraq In Fragments - James Longley Interview - Pt. 6 - Final Questions

Q: What did you do for cash while you were there? How did you get money? What was the currency people were using?

A: The Iraqi currency is the Iraqi Dinar. There was a period of massive inflation during the Gulf War period where a lot of people lost their life savings but, surprisingly, it stayed fairly steady between the pre-war and post-war period. I think it went from being 1500 Dinar to the dollar to being 2000, maximum 3000 Dinar. So I was expecting hundreds of percent decline of value of the Dinar following the war, but they basically stabilized it artificially enough and fixed it to the dollar and then the United States introduced a new currency that didn't have Saddam on it, where they basically chopped off three zeros and it became easier to deal with. So, you could use the local currency, but the dollar was still completely transferable, people would prefer dollars if you had them and just as anywhere with currencies which were selling dollars there's a difference in the market between the buying and selling rate so...

Q: Were you generally walking around with a giant wad of cash?

A: No, I never walked around with a big wad of anything. Not, at least, because I didn't have a big wad of cash, but I generally didn't carry a lot of money on me in Iraq. I would sort of, I only ever had $2000 or $3000 at a time, maximum, and I would keep it stored away somewhere, hidden in my hotel room or something like that. But it was tough to get money into the country. Like I said, it was a fairly low budget production until the end of shooting, but that first two-and-a-half years, where it was pre-production/production, it was done entirely on money coming from the video sales of The Gaza Strip, which is available through Arab Film Distribution here and you can get it on Amazon or whatever. But basically every quarter a royalty check would come in, they would transfer it into my bank account here, then my mother,AeP because you can't, I thought, well okay, I'll go online, I'll do wire transfers from my US bank account to a Jordanian bank account and then,AeP but you can't actually, you can't go online, they don't let you make wire transfers internationally from outside the country through the internet. You know, they're trying to prevent people from moving money around, moving money outside the country, from abroad. So I'm sure there are ways of doing it, but not through the kind of bank account I have, which is your average, normal whitebread bank account. And so what I had to do was basically, money would come into, and it was literally only like $1500 a month, my bank account here [Seattle], then I would go online and transfer money from my account to my mother's account, which is also in the United States, then she would make a wire transfer outside the United States to a bank in Jordan or Turkey, which had agreements with banks or companies inside Iraq, then they would get a bank transfer with a particular name and passport number attached to it and I would hopefully be in their records somewhere and then I'd go to them and say, 'I've transferred x number of dollars'. They would take their percentage off the top, I'd get my money and that's how you got money into Iraq. There are no bank machines. And the banking structure didn't work that well. There are no international banks in Iraq and so it's only because they have agreements with banks and companies outside that you're able to move money into the country. So, it's a great mechanism by which the Iraqis are able to move money outside the country without actually physically moving the money.

Q: So how was the food? Did you gain or lose weight while you where there?

A: I was actually keeping in fairly good shape, better than I am here, because I would swim a lot. In Baghdad there was the Al Hamra Hotel next door to our primitive lowly apartment building where all the indie journalists lived. You could go there and pay $5 and swim in the pool all day, which on a 120-)()( day is great. And so I got into fairly good shape while I was there. While I've been here I've been in a windowless room editing constantly for six months, eating sushi and gaining weight, so,AeP and there you're working, you're moving around, it's completely different. But the food is,AeP it's not terrible if you don't mind chicken and rice. You can eat a lot of chicken and rice very cheaply in Iraq with different sauces. Tomato based sauces or, in the North sometimes you could get a really good, what kind of fruit is that, not a peach, but a...

Q: An apricot?

A: Apricot sauce. Yeah, you could get a side of roast chicken with rice and apricot sauce and pine nuts.

Q: Sounds pretty good.

A: After a long day of filming, you could really dive into one of those. But the fact is there wasn't a lot of diversity and this is the restaurants that we're talking about. And it was essentially the same whether you were in Nasiriya or up in the North in Arbil. The food had zero variation with a few notable exceptions in Baghdad. There was a Chinese restaurant in Baghdad, there was also a Chinese restaurant in Suleimaniyah where I went once and that was the only escape from the drudgery of chicken and rice and salads made of sliced cucumbers and tomatoes. It's not bad, but it does get tiring after awhile and while I was living in the North I would use the hotel's kitchen and I would just go in there and have my own saucepans and frying pans and I would make different pastas and curries and all kinds of stuff just to keep myself alive without having to eat chicken with rice every single day and the people there thought I was totally crazy. They would smell this garlic and onions and curry powder frying in the kitchen and they would say, "You're gassing us like Saddam Hussein. It's the next gas attack!" They had no idea what it was, they had never smelled anything like it.

Q: Your project came about when, during the Q&A following the premiere of The Gaza Strip, someone asked: "What are you going to make next?" So, to bring it around full circle, what is your next project?

A: Actually, I'm not sure yet, that's the brutal truth. It's not that I don't have any ideas, it's just that I probably have too many at this stage. I'm in this weird situation where, having won awards for best director, best editor, best cinematographer on this movie at Sundance, I'm having really good critical feedback on the film so far. I feel like if I were to go with a serious pitch on any important subject to a good national broadcaster, be it PBS or The BBC or even Danish TV or whoever, then I would probably get more interest than I did in the past. Anyway, it would be taken more seriously than when I approached them with The Gaza Strip where no one really wanted to hear about it. So there's this weird feeling where I feel like I could pretty much immediately go out and get up front funding, development funding, for a new project and I have a lot of different ideas. I'm just not sure which one is the right one yet and it's a difficult decision, because once you jump in to a project, at least for an obsessive-compulsive person like me, I can't really stop then, you know what I mean? I can't go half-way and then say well, this wasn't a very good idea, so I feel very much impelled to,AeP. compelled? Is there a word impelled?

Q: There is a word 'impelled'.

A: Yeah, there is.

Q: But I think it has a more passive connotation.

A: Yes. I feel very compelled to, laughs, to pick a particular project before embarking on it and it's sometimes difficult to predict what the right project is going to be. I mean, in the case of Iraq, even, say ahead of time,AeP but the United States is definitely going to invade the country, they're definitely going to overthrow the government and they're definitely going to occupy the country and it's definitely going to be an important story for years and years into the future. Right now you can basically predict the United States is going to do something to Iran. You're not exactly sure what it's going to be and there's even less certainty about what would happen if that did take place. If the United States did start to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities you could pretty much bet it would result in a lot of trouble, but not predict necessarily that if you even got into Iran in the first place, you'd be able to film anything in that circumstance . I think it's highly unlikely that the United States would be able to overthrow the Iranian government without serious repercussions and it wouldn't go anything like the way it's gone in Iraq, which is badly, it would go probably far worse. So in that kind of circumstance, even though you can predict that something's going to happen, there's no way of predicting whether you'll be able to make a film about it and that's very difficult. And there are a lot of other subjects in the world that are worthy of documenting. North Korea is very interesting. You can't get into North Korea. There's nothing you can really film there as far as I can tell. It would take a miracle to get access in a place like that.

Q: I saw a Dutch documentary at SIFF this past year shot in North Korea [North Korea - A Day in the Life]. It was interesting, but you didn't get to see very much.

A: Right. I mean it's one of those things where if you get to see anything at all you're lucky. And you know, the problem with an independent documentary filmmaker who's interested in big political and social issues, but also wants to do everything from a kind of ground level point of view with ordinary people as the main characters is that oftentimes you run into a situation where the place where you want to film happens to be a police state or a dictatorship or otherwise very difficult. For example, while Egypt is full of interesting stories and interesting people, you simply can't make a film there as an American journalist and that's highly unfortunate. There may be ways of doing it that I haven't discovered yet but my impression of Egypt, while I was there during the war, was they would not be interested in having people make films about ordinary people. You know, they want you to film documentaries about pyramids and camels and then afterwards they complain Americans don't know anything about Egypt except pyramids and camels. So, it's this complete hypocrisy and self-defeating nonsense that most of these big authoritarian Arab governments are engaged in.

Q: Have you thought of the possibility of doing a documentary on Muslims living in Europe? I would think that would be a fascinating subject.

A: Or, indeed, the United States. I thought of doing something about France and the Algerian and Moroccan population in Paris. I was thinking about that before the riots broke out and then I thought to myself, well this story has already broken and now there's bound to be ten different documentary filmmakers working on it in France, who speak French and who probably also speak Arabic and the North African variety of Arabic and I can't really compete. Same thing with Iran. In Iraq there really wasn't anyone who was on the ground making films from the local population that I knew of. So, it seemed like there was a reason, there was room for someone to come in from outside and make a film and bring it back to the United States, because it's a subject which is important also for people in the United States, but with most things in the world you have to make a judgment call about whether if you go and make a film how worthwhile is it going to be. Is it going to be something which hasn't been shown before or are you going to be able to show us a situation in a new way that it hasn't been seen before? Is it something which is better done by a local filmmaker who better understands the situation and speaks the language? I speak Russian fluently. I could go to Russia and make a documentary without working with a translator. I'm not sure which subject I would tackle in Russia right now. Also, Russia is becoming increasingly difficult, because of its internal politics and crackdown on the free press and freedom of speech and Americans are still regarded with some suspicion in many places. So all these things are tough. I mean, I could make a film in the United States, but there are so many people making films in the United States and it's hard to know exactly which issue to approach. I would love to make a documentary film about the situation in Southern Sudan, because all the films that seem to be made here are about people who have fled Sudan and are in the United States, like God Grew Tired of Us: The Story of Lost Boys of Sudan. Whereas I don't think we've seen that many documentaries that are actually filmed in Sudan about the situation there and that's a bigger challenge and harder to do. That might be something that would be illuminating and worthwhile and not overly redundant. Africa, in general, is a continent which is very far off most people's radar and poorly understood and also extremely diverse and interesting. I have a lot of ideas and it hasn't yet crystallized in my mind which one is the one. Right now I have this time period where I'm going to film festivals and promoting Iraq In Fragments and waiting for it to get picked up by some distributor and while all this stuff is kind of hanging, maybe because all this stuff is sort of hanging and still in the works, my brain really hasn't focused on the next project, but I feel confident that at a certain point I'll start to get this nervous antsy feeling 'why am I not making a new film' and then something will happen in the world and it'll be this inspiration and I'll go and do it.

Q: Well, whatever it is, I look forward to seeing it! Thank you very much for the interview.

A: Thank you.

Iraq in Fragments image from James Longley's website.

Iraq In Fragments - James Longley Interview - Pt. 5 - Technical Questions

Q: If one thinks of a film camera as being like a paint brush and a roll of film as being like paint, then a video camera is, in a way, both paint and brush, the character of the video image being largely determined by the choice of the camera. How do you feel about the Panasonic DVX-100 and 100A's that you used? What particular characteristics of those cameras made them particularly amenable to your project?

A: There are three main reasons why using a camera like this is actually better than using a camera like the one I used in The Gaza Strip. In The Gaza Strip I used the Sony DSR-500, which is a $15,000, on-the-shoulder, DV camera with a big broadcast lens on it and it has its advantages, the main one being that people see you with this big camera and they give you access to things that you might not normally get. On the other hand, cameras like the Panasonic are cheaper. You can buy two or three and have redundancy. If the camera breaks down during two years of shooting in Iraq well, you can just pull out another camera and start working again. They're light, you can film all day and not get tired and a lot of times I was filming all day. You can run with the camera. They're not so expensive that you're afraid to get them dirty, that you're afraid to use them as a tool, that you're afraid to put them down on the ground and film from the ground, which I did quite a bit, like filming those big meetings of people in the second chapter where you would see these close ups of people's faces. Most of the time I'm lying on the ground with the camera resting on the ground and resting the front end of it on the edge of my hand. I never used any tripods. But the third and most important reason is these cameras will film at cinema speed, at 24 frames per second and they'll do it in progressive scan images, so there's no interlaced artifacts. When things move you don't have this comb pattern on the edges of objects and there's such a difference in that. You compare The Gaza Strip, which was filmed in interlaced NTSC video and blown up to 35mm. You compare that 35mm print with the 35mm print of Iraq In Fragments and Iraq In Fragments will look phenomenally better, even though it's a much less expensive camera. But the fact that one frame of video equals one frame of film and it's not an interlaced frame, where you have two fields a 60th of a second apart, but it's as if you've taken this photograph, albeit a low resolution photograph, makes it feel so much more cinematic and so much more fluid in its motion that the result is really orders of magnitude better. So, this is key. If I had to continue shooting movies in standard definition, as long as I was able to do it at cinema frame rate with progressive scan images I would be able to accept it, because if you can do that you're basically working within the same kind of visual parameters as your basic 16mm reversal stock or whatever. It gives you the ability shoot in a cinematic way. The way I grew up watching movies, I didn't have a television. My parents didn't let me have a television and then as I grew older I never developed the desire to buy one and I still don't have one. I have always just gone to the movie theater to watch movies and experience television at friends' houses, so I've always been really attracted to the cinema look. And when I'm filming, I'm thinking about how is this image, how are these frames going to appear on a forty foot screen in a movie theater? I'm not thinking how are they going to look on TV. I'm filming from the very beginning for projection on the big screen. And if I can get that right, well, the television will follow. But I think it's a completely different mindset you have to have if you're filming for the cinema than if you're filming for TV.

Q: Aside from the 24p Advanced capability, were there other aspects of the camera you liked, such as the tonal range or color rendition? The camera has a reputation for having these cine-like gamma settings.
A: Right. There are deficiencies of the DV format itself being 25-megabits per second, it's not that much information, they're really squeezing as much as they can into this thin pipe. The chroma, for example. If you have an object which is pure red, it has less resolution than a green object or something like that, because that's just the way the camera is recording color and it will appear a little bit blocky around the edges. Thankfully, in the 35mm blowup you actually don't see that. You can see it on the DVD, but if you watch this film on 35mm, you won't see that blockiness. It kind of fades out, it's dissipated and you don't notice these hard, blocky edges to red objects, like the fire in the third chapter. If you look at the people who are illuminated by this red light it's kind of like this blocky low resolution look, but in 35mm you don't see that.
Q: How did you correct for that in the blowup?
A: The transition from DV standard definition size to high definition size is just done through the proprietary blowup process at Modern Digital. They export the film as a sequence of tiff's, every frame is a frame, every frame is a tiff file and they're all numbered 000001 to a 132,000 or whatever, about a 130,000 tiff files and then they're all in a single folder and you bring them over on a hard drive to Modern Digital and they take the tiff files and import them into their own system and basically blow it up to a high definition size and correct a little bit for the aspect ratio, because it's not perfect. If you look at the tiff file it's a little bit wider than it needs to be, like a circular object would be a little bit oval, so they correct for that and do the framing up to a high definition 16:9 frame, because it was shot letterboxed instead of anamorphic.
Q: I was curious if you did the aspect ratio electronically or with an anamorphic lens.
A: It was done electronically. I shot letter boxed to get the 16:9 aspect ratio instead of an anamorphic lens, because the anamorphic lens, which I think is made by Century Optics,AeP I looked at one, my friend Andrew Berends who came to Iraq and also made some films had one. It's very heavy, it throws off the balance of the camera, it becomes very forward weighted, which is difficult if you're doing everything handheld and you want to have that kind of balance. The camera is very well balanced by itself, but once you put that big chunk of glass on the front it throws it off. But the main reason is you're losing a little bit of your optical clarity by having this anamorphic lens on the front of the camera and you lose your ability to focus on objects up close. With these cameras you can focus right up to the lens and a lot of the time when I'm filming, you see it especially a lot in the first chapter, I'm very close to people, I'm right behind the ear of the kid, I'm filming over his shoulder and I want him to be in focus in the foreground. This kind of shot would be impossible with an anamorphic front on the camera, because it pushes your minimum focus distance way out, maybe two or three feet and this is completely unacceptable for my style of shooting where I need to be in close quarters with people and right next to someone, filming them and still have the background. So, it's really for this reason. The principal at work if you're shooting in letterbox, instead of an anamorphic front on the camera, is the same principal at work if you're a cinematographer working in 35mm and you decide to shoot in Super 35 instead of with anamorphic optics. That is, you're using the normal spherical optics of the camera and you're simply cutting off the top and bottom of the frame to get this aspect ratio of cinemascope and so you lose some of the film resolution that you would otherwise have, the vertical resolution of the film, but you're gaining in having a sharper picture, sharper optics, more depth-of-field which is important in 35mm, less important in video, because usually you have too much depth-of-field in video and also your ability to focus on objects close up is much better. So, a lot of movies now are shooting in Super 35mm. There's many examples, everything from Speed and True Lies to Walk The Line and on an on, these are all Super 35mm films that are then blown up to anamorphic with an inter-positive. In my case, there's no inter-positive, there's this high definition version of the film, which we color correct then transfer onto 35mm, but prior to that it's never on film so,AeP I'm actually looking forward to working in high definition with the Panasonic HVX200, because it's going to allow me,AeP it already has a 16:9 chip-set, so if you letterbox that a little bit, then you're at anamorphic, you're at cinemascope, you're at a 2.35:1 aspect ratio, so what this camera is essentially going to let someone like me do is go back to where I was as a university student shooting in Cinemascope, but do it on inexpensive video where I can letterbox this high definition image a little bit and come out with Cinemascope.
Q: For sound did you go with the mic on the camera or did you strap a shotgun on?
A: I never used the actual microphone that's built into the camera. I always used a Sony short shotgun microphone, it's the same kind if microphone they use a lot on the DSR500 and the sound is good from that and on top of that it has the foam wind cover and on top of the wind cover I'd put a Rycote Softie, this kind of furry wind cover. The big issue with that was the fur, the strands of fur from this wind cover would get into the top of the frame and you wouldn't see it necessarily when you were filming, but when you looked at it later you'd see these little fluffy things, especially when the wind is blowing, coming down into the top right hand corner of the frame and so eventually I just took a pair of scissors and gave give this Rycote Softie a little haircut on the front and sort of changed the angle at which it could work. It probably cut down on its effectiveness a little, but it also got it out of the frame. In addition to that microphone I used a Tram lavalier, it's like a $400 clip-on that's wired, not wireless. It has an 8-10ft. cable that comes out of it and also an XLR plug and it has very good sound. The reason I picked up that microphone is that for something in the $300 range, B&H sold me on the quality of this microphone and that's how I recorded all the interviews with the kids and people that are voice-over in the film.
Q: The fast and slow motion effects. Were those all done in post?
A: Well, the things like the train, which is speeded up and I think that's the only speeded up thing in the film, is done in post. Slow motion, you can't do it in the camera, but there weren't that many slow motion shots in the film, but they are there and they are all done in post. They actually look nicer than normal video, because you're taking solid frames,AeP when I would do a slow motion shot I was always taking even divisions. I would say, okay, for making things faster, instead of it being 24 frames per second, I want it to be 12 or instead of 24 I want it to be 48. So I would say 200% instead of 100% in terms of the speed. I would never try to be like 78% or something, so it always wound up being a situation where the frames were simply being duplicated, which is something I had done before in my 35mm documentary, there are a couple of scenes where we didn't have enough light to film, so we filmed it 12 frames per second to increase the exposure by a factor of two and then we optically printed the material out back to 24, which is an interesting effect and I'd like to try it in the future as well.
Q: You shot 300 hours of footage. Did you go to Iraq with 300 tapes?
A: No, I went with maybe 100 tapes and then as I filmed and started to get near the end I would just buy more and more boxes of tape and people brought in tapes for me from outside. I would go on-line and transfer money from my bank account to somebody's else's bank account who was coming into the country and they would generously bring in tapes.
Q: Did you keep everything with you the entire time you were there or would you periodically send things home?
A: I kept things with me. You know, it was a big worry on my mind, what's going to happen. I didn't have any copies of these tapes. I still don't have duplicate copies of my original tapes. I was digitizing material onto hard-drives. These big LaCie 500 gigabyte hard-drives. I had four of them in the country, plus some smaller 250 gig drives. So that allowed me to digitize probably 200 hours of material that I was translating, because the translations were all done off the laptop from digitized material, because I had to go back and forth, back and forth, over and over and be able to stop, frame-accurately and that was much easier to do in the computer than it would have been using the camera, it would have destroyed the cameras to do translations off the tapes. It would have also destroyed the tapes. So, when I had important material, I would digitize it and then do the translations off of that. I had a backup on the hard-drive of most of the material, especially the translated material, but not of everything and in the end I left Iraq with these six boxes, each with 50 tapes in them, in a backpack and also a great deal of baggage. I had to pay extra baggage dues going from Diyarbakir in Turkey flying into Istanbul then, once in Istanbul, I went to DHL and packed up all of my hard-drives with bubble wrap and sent them to Seattle.
Q: How many camera batteries did you travel with?
A: I had probably five different batteries of the large Panasonic variety. Some of them actually were these Empire batteries, which I don't recommend. The life of them is actually very low by comparison. Anyone going out on this kind of trip, I would recommend you get the Panasonic batteries or the Sony batteries or whatever they're using for their camera and not go with these kind of secondary companies.
Q: Was the availability of electricity ever a problem?
A: Oh, all the time. You'd be in Baghdad and you're editing and the power would go out. You have all these hard-drives connected to your computer. The first thing that you have to do in this kind of situation is buy a bunch of UPS systems, so when the power goes off there's still power going to the hard-drives and it doesn't kill them, because it would kill them otherwise. You know they're spinning at 5200 rpm or 7200 rpm or whatever it is and suddenly the power goes off, you know the heads are reading and writing and there's no way to replace these hard-drives, I mean in the country you can't buy them, so you have to protect them and the only way to do that is to buy these UPS system, plug everything into the UPS and run everything through these battery powered backup power sources. They would also help to regulate the current. And so that's how I worked. Luckily, those kinds of things were readily available in the country, because everyone had their computers and they had to deal with these problems themselves. So it was very easy to buy a UPS system in the country. Also, the temperature would skyrocket inside the rooms because there's no air-conditioning, no fans, there's no electricity, so even if you're working on your laptop and say the national power goes out, then the hotel might kick in electricity to the power outlets and the lights, but they wouldn't kick electricity to the air-conditioners, because they were running off a generator and they can't generate enough power to cool the building. So suddenly you're working inside this room where the ambient temperature is going past a 100-)()( and the speed of your laptop starts to decrease, because the computer loses its ability to exchange heat. The ambient temperature of the room is just as hot as the temperature of the computer, so its not losing any heat. It just keeps on getting hotter and hotter,AeP laughs. And the effective speed of the processor decreases. It was a big problem and very uncomfortable, plus it's very hard to work like that. In Northern Iraq, because I was there for about nine months and I was doing all this translation work while I was there, we ran a cable from an adjoining city block, down the street and ran it into my hotel room so that when the power went out in the hotel I would flip a switch down on the wall and get power going to my computer system again. It was a three hours on, three hours off type of situation and if you have a guy driving to another part of the city to work on translations he can't really work for three hours and then break for three hours and then work for three hours and then break for three hours, you know, you have other things to do,AeP laughs,AeP besides wait for the power to come back. They were supplying 50% electricity. It wasn't as if the city was half-on, half the time and half-off, half the time. They were simply supplying 50% of the power instead of 100%, so they would do it by neighborhood and they would give X, Y, Z neighborhoods power in this three hour block and then they'd give A, B and C neighborhoods for the other three-hour block. So, if you had a cable running from one neighborhood to another neighborhood you could basically switch off and that's the way a lot of people did it.
Q: Of all the credits in the film the one that I found the most surprising and impressive was that you did the music, which was quite good. Do you have a musical background?
A: No.
Q: How did you go about doing the score?
A: Well, there are three kinds of music in the film. There's music which is just playing on location on a radio or something like that and I'm there with my microphone, I record it and it winds up on the background of the scene. Then there's music that I recorded in Iraq, that's performed by people who are actually in the film. Like, for example, the kid singing during the raid scene is the kid that you see saying 'Allah akbar' into the microphone. I said, 'look, you have a good voice, let's record one of these Shiite religious songs' and he said 'okay' and he came in and did it in one take and it's a great performance to which I then added percussion and other kinds of sounds and made the soundtrack for that scene and there are other things like it in the Kurdish chapter. I recorded hours of Kurdish folk music with people from that area and from other areas and then used it. Sometimes I would use it straight like, for example, there's a scene where Suleiman Mahmoud is walking with his sheep and you hear this song that he sings, this Kurdish folk song and again it's a case of me sitting down with him the first day that I met him and saying 'do you know any Kurdish songs' and he sang four, five songs and that was just the nicest one. So, there's that kind of music and the music during the snowball fight scene, this kind of singing and drumbeat, that's just the neighbors of Suleiman in their living room and I'm taping with two different microphones, the camera microphone and the Tram microphone simultaneously. There's that, which I then mixed together on the Macintosh and added my own different effects to, in some cases, and then there is music which is entirely constructed by me, all kinds of ambient tracks and drones and things that used to be ordinary sounds, maybe that I recorded that I then made into sounds that are completely unrecognizable. In the beginning of the first chapter of the film, for example, you actually hear a completely filtered version of Suleiman's voice from the third chapter in film, as one of the drones during one of the scenes. I think in the scene where the boss is beating Mohammed. It actually gives a kind of disturbing sort of feel. So there's a great deal of sound that's made like that. The orchestral sounding transitional music during the train sequence, that's made in Logic Pro. I don't have a midi keyboard or anything. I just used the qwerty, typewriter keyboard and from that program, if you have the caps lock on, you can use the keyboard as a piano and all of that music is made like that and that soundtrack is basically like chopsticks, I mean there's nothing to it.
Q: Well, it sounds a lot like Philip Glass.
A: But Philip Glass also sounds like chopsticks. So, that kind of stuff was easy to do. You know, I like Philip Glass and that kind of minimalist style for films. I think it's very effective and so there's that influence. And also, particularly in the train sequence, I was listening to music like, Different Trains by Steve Reich, which is based on the different train whistles from Europe and the United States. It's a great piece of music. I was definitely inspired by that when I was making the train transition music and that became the transition soundtrack for all of the chapters in the film.
Q: How about the ambient music. Some of it reminded me of British industrial ambient stuff like Nurse With Wound,AeP
A: Haven't heard that.
Q: ,AePor SPK
A: No.
Q: ,AePor Eno.
A: Oh, like Music For Airports.
Q: Not necessarily that, but maybe something like,AeP
A: Well, Music For Airports I've actually heard.
Q: But something more like the darker, dronier sort of things like,AeP I was wondering if there was some particular kind of thing,AeP
A: No, in terms of that stuff, I haven't,AeP I don't have a big collection of drony music.
Q: Laughs.
A: ,AePbut that kind of ambient music is easy to make synthetically and it happens often to be appropriate. It has a good use in this kind of film where it sets a kind of a mood that's fairly subliminal and doesn't attract attention to itself, but it's kind of there. So, during the political meeting in the second chapter, where everything starts to fall apart and unravel, you definitely hear this kind of droning sound or deep rumbles in the soundtrack. It's more noticeable in the movie theater where everything is separated out by channels and you get that kind of effect and it kind of lends to this sort of growing feeling of uncertainty and breakdown of the social fabric.
Q: Well, it was very good, you were very effective at it. 

Iraq in Fragments image from  James Longley's website.

Iraq In Fragments - James Longley Interview - Pt. 4 - Kurdish Spring

Q: The third part of the film begins with a succession of railway shots, some in fast motion, which ultimately takes you to this spectacular Kurdish countryside and, in watching the film, there's this sense of relief, escaping the city to this beautiful place. Was this something you personally felt?

A: Yes! And not only me. If you're in Baghdad and you want to go on vacation, the only place to do it inside Iraq is to drive up to the North and hang out in the mountains, which a lot of people do on the weekends. The security situation is totally different, the local Kurdish security is controlling everything and there are very, very few bombings. You don't have the United States military present in this kind of overt way that you have in the Central and Southern parts of the country. So the whole atmosphere is different. I lived in this really inexpensive hotel with no security for nine months in the North from September 2004 to April 2005 and never had a single worry that,AeP the keys to the room would open practically every door in the place... laughs. You know it was very low security and I had my computer, two terabytes of disc-space and all of the cameras and everything lying around and nothing was ever taken out of my room. I never had any problems even with this kind of basic personal possession type of security. It was very, very easy and a totally different atmosphere than what there was in Baghdad at that time.

Q: The Kurds themselves come across as the nicest, most open people in the film. 

 
A: Well, you know, the Kurds are very nice and the rest of Iraqis are also very nice and it's probably my fault that you don't see as much of that sort of ordinary people, family life type situation in my film. If I have something that I regret more than anything about this movie, it's that the material which I wound up including in the film doesn't give the full picture of Iraqi, Arab hospitality in the same way it does with the Kurds. The fact is that, of course, there was a completely different atmosphere in the Central and Southern parts of the country toward foreigners, toward Americans, but that didn't prevent people, even those who opposed the US military occupation, from being very hospitable and very kind. If the section that was cut from the film, which features a Sunni farming family, South of Baghdad in Mahmudiya, had been included, you'd probably come away with a different perception of what the ordinary Arab civilian population in Central Iraq is like, because it's this very loving, beautiful family and this doesn't come across in the film. That's perhaps,AeP it's one of those compromises with practicality that you make as a filmmaker that you don't have time to include all of that material, but the fact that there is this perception of a different atmosphere in the Kurdish North than there is in the rest of the film is actually accurate, because there is a very different atmosphere. It's not that the people are any nicer or any worse, it's just that the Kurds are not under occupation, effectively. They are under occupation, but it's an invisible occupation. There are Americans there, but they're not in the streets in their Humvees, they're not patrolling the skies with their helicopters, you don't see them. They're there, but they have this security agreement with the local governments, so they're perceived in a completely different way and people don't have this interaction with them the way they do in the rest of the country. So, there's a different,AeP you could say that life continued pretty much uninterrupted through the war period of 2003, but there were these governments, based on the parties the PUK and the PDK, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and Kurdistan Democratic Party, which are the two ruling Kurdish parties in the North. They had a civil war in the beginning of the 1990's, which no one really remembers. They had a civil war and most of the buildings between Arbil and Diana and these other places, Rawanduz and so forth, bear the scars of that civil war. The hotel where I lived had bullet holes and rocket impact markings on the walls. Anyway, those two parties reconciled and between them they split the parliament 50-50 and now they're ruling the North and they have these security agreements with the United States that prevents the United States from acting unilaterally in the North. So you don't have the US going on raids and arresting people in the same way that they do in the rest of the country. And because these governments have been running things since the mid-90's, though it was very difficult under the sanctions period for the Kurds as well as the rest of the country, they've had this uninterrupted rulership that's indigenous. So there's this feeling of stability, which there isn't in the rest of the country, combined with the absence of overt occupation and their acceptance of the occupying power, because it works to their own political advantage to have the Americans there.

Q: One thing that was kind of interesting was a classroom scene of kids getting an English lesson. As a matter of fact, I think it's the only time you hear English in the film. Was that unusual in Iraq? Was that something particular to the North?

 
A: No. A lot of Iraqis take English in school, it's completely normal, just as normal in Basra as it is in the North, but the Kurdish schools are taught in Kurdish and people mostly study Arabic because of religion class and they have to be able to read the Koran in the original Arabic. So, that's the main reason people study Arabic at all these days and there's a rebellion against speaking and studying Arabic on the part of many university students and people of that age, whereas the older generation of Kurds and Assyrians and people living in that area all understand Arabic, because of their history with Baghdad and because everyone was in the military or whatever. My translator in the North was an Assyrian guy, which is a Christian group in Iraq, who speaks English, that he taught himself, spoke Arabic, because he was in the Military for twelve years and fought in the Iran/Iraq war and the Gulf War and everything else and spoke his native Assyrian and also spoke Kurdish and a smattering of Turkish, because of the Turkmen population. So, people are largely multilingual in Iraq and especially in the Northern part, but the younger generation now is rebelling against the study of Arabic for political reasons. They want to be independent, they don't want to have anything to do with Baghdad rule, so if given the choice between studying Arabic and studying English, they're more likely to go for English, because it's this kind of pro-Western, pro-American political feeling which is very much present.

Q: At the end of the film the father of one of the boys says, "You cannot escape America's reach," then he tells a story about two wrestlers. Someone is observing two wrestlers and asks them whose side is God on and they respond, "God is on the always on the side of the winner. Whoever wins god is on his side." That's an interesting and somewhat open sentiment to close the film with and you could interpret it in many ways, depending on who you see as the wrestling parties, it could either be the Americans vs. the Iraqis or the Kurds vs. the Iraqis...

 
A: But the basic idea is that whoever wins, God is on his side and I included that at the end of the film as a closing sentiment, because I think it reflects the state of international politics today, which is not ruled by international law, it's ruled by winner take all and the-ends-justify-the-means kinds of politics. So, I think if you were to go back and Mahmoud, the old guy, and ask the same question, he would probably say, "Oh well, God is always on the side of the person who is in the right, who is doing the right thing." You know, he's very pious, but for whatever reason it sort of slipped out at that time in this far more realistic way which is, if you can take it, if you can get it, if you can win, then you're in the right and when he was talking about America controlling everything in Iraq he's talking specifically about America's ability to decide the fate of Kurdistan. That is to say America will decide whether the Kurds will have their own independent state or be under Baghdad rule. It's in America's power to decide this issue and he's not wrong about that, but at the same time it's an interesting sentiment in a broader sense, 'One cannot escape America's reach.' I think that's the way the entire world feels right now, that if the United States wants to do something, if they want to change the government of Venezuela well, by god, they're going to step in and do it and no one can really stop that. And certainly in this period of 2003, before the souring of the occupation, there was definitely this sentiment of Pax Americana, of America being the undisputed ruler of the world that can simply go and do whatever they like. So the ending of the film is reflective of that reality.

Q: Then the last image is of his son...

 
A: ...and he's walking into the night...

Q: ...with his bicycle and he says to his friends "I'm going. God be with you." It's a very moving ending and it's almost as if you yourself were saying, "I am leaving you now. Good luck."

 
A: Right. Yeah, I mean in a way that's true. You know, what can you do? It's this feeling of well, whatever happens, happens and that is the way I felt when I left the country. That my work there was done, there was nothing more I could do, there was nothing I could do to affect the situation. The country is in this very tenuous position, no matter which way you look at it. If the Americans stay, if the Americans go, either way there's a huge potential in Iraq for civil war, for the breakup of the society. It has been for years now always on the brink of disaster and that disaster has crept into the lives of many people, hundreds of thousands of people, and so it's a country which has been destroyed by the political and power aspirations of its own leadership and that of other countries. So the overriding sentiment of my film, if it has one, is to look at the country from the point of view of ordinary people to remind you that these are the people you should be caring about, you should be thinking about. Who cares about these governments, Saddam Hussein or what have you, these people who are always seeking power, seeking control, whether it's the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein or whether it's the aspirations of the Bush administration in the region. These aren't the people that you should really be worried about. You should be worried about how policies are going to play out on the ground and effect the lives of ordinary people, because they they're no different from you in most respects.

Image from The New York Times (an 11-year-old named Mohammed with his boss in Baghdad / Iraq In Fragments / Credit: Typecast Releasing).

Iraq In Fragments - James Longley Interview - Pt. 3 - Sadr's South

Q: In the second section of the film there's an interesting tension where you have the Sadrists and the militias and they're doing the alcohol raids and so-forth and you have this shot, after one of the raids, where this detained man who's blindfolded says, "We were saved from one oppression and you have brought another?" So you have this sense of these men, particularly the cleric you are following, as full of passion. They're pushing for having a real political process and having actual elections and you see they're very idealistic and they have a sense of integrity, but you also get the feeling that if they really ran the country the way they wanted it would very much be like Iran, a very repressive society.

A: Right, and this is the reality which is now taking shape in Iraq. It's not merely the Sadr movement, which has this kind of conservative religious foundation, it's also the Dawa party, the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq [SCIRI] and the Sistani people, who also have exactly the same religious foundation in conservative Shiite Islam. So, right now, Iraq has a constitution which states that nothing in Iraqi law should run counter to Sharia law, Islamic law, so the United States has wittingly or unwittingly put into power people in Iraq who are very sympathetic with the kind of Iranian style conservative Islam that we rail against in this country. So, right now, the United States is arming, training and funding a government which is very much allied with Iran and you know it's ironic. The prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari was previously in exile in Iran and he has very strong ties there.

Q: But still there is this kind of double-edged quality that... for instance you just had the elections in the Occupied Territories where Hamas had this big victory.

A: Right.

Q: And one of the things you typically hear is that one of the reasons these guys win is,AeP there was this piece by Ari Shavit in the February 6, New Yorker where he interviewed Shalom Harari, a former Israeli Military Intelligence officer who has been following Hamas for almost a quarter century and he said, "In Jordan, too, wherever there are free elections--trade unions, student unions, professional guilds--the Islamists have the upper hand. If the Hashemite kings had not played all kinds of tricks, the Islamists would have had a large representation in parliament as well. And when Egypt held its American-inspired parliamentary elections recently, the number of seats won by the Muslim Brotherhood rose fivefold. Throughout the Middle East, the Muslim Brotherhood is the main power with grassroots support. The Islamists are less corrupt. They are the ones with integrity and compassion. They are of the people and they speak for the people. Today in the Arab world, the choice is clear between democratically elected Islamists and Western-leaning dictators." So, you seem to have this double-edged sword in that they might ultimately be the more repressive guys, but they're also perceived as being more ethical.

A: Right, well, I think that the more secular, this trend in the Middle East has a long and complicated history. And I think it would pay to go back to the Cold War and, in the case of Palestinian-Israeli situation, it would pay probably to go back to the early 1980's and remember that the United States, for example, in Afghanistan was supporting the Islamists over the Communists for its own political purposes and did, I think, exactly the same thing in Iran when the Shah was overthrown. The Ayatollah Khomeini was flown in from Paris with the acquiescence of the United States, because there was a left-leaning movement in Iran at that time that was about to take over. And in the case of Iraq you have this Islamist government, which is now being supported by United States, coming to power. There were other forces in the society, but they were also supported by the United States,AeP A secular movement like the Baath party, but they were also very anti-Communist and the Communist party was crushed by them. And the Israelis, of course, supported Hamas in its inception as a counterweight to the secular Fatah movement of Yassir Arafat. And these things have a tendency to backfire. You know, there's been a lot of interference by the West and by various forces within the Middle East to play different groups off of each other and sometimes this simply results in the rise to power of groups which had originally been used as pawns. I think, also, groups like Fatah have a tendency to shoot themselves in the foot by being corrupt and ineffectual. And the United States is partly to blame in that, because you have a leader like Mahmoud Abbas, but you don't allow him to actually do anything or get anything done and Sharon, I think, met with him only one time and nothing was accomplished at that meeting. So if you have these more secular leaning Westernized leaders and you don't allow them to do anything, of course they're going to lose at the polls next time there's an election. So, I think that the victory of Hamas is definitely also a victory for the Israeli right-wing, because it means that they'll be able to continue their policy of unilateral action toward the Palestinians, which means the unilateral expansion of settlements, the unilateral construction of the wall, which is effectively annexing large sections of West Bank and dividing the West Bank into sections. And this is all being done unilaterally without negotiations with the Palestinians and having Hamas in power just means they'll be able to continue moving in this direction. I don't think that it will necessarily have a good end result, but this is the effect.

Q: You said in your notes that you never really understood why the Sadr organization trusted you as much as they did.

A: Well, yeah, I mean it was strange. It was strange that they let me hang out and film them for so long. I could see that some of them thought I must be a spy and I kept on thinking to myself how long is this going to last where I have this access and they don't kick me out and I think in the end it was just the result of the fact that they had taken me in originally and they didn't want to go back on their word. They didn't want to rescind the hospitality they had been showing me without any kind of good reason. As long as I followed the rules and I was polite and they had no reason to think that, no concrete reason to think that I was spying for some other government or power, then they couldn't just come to me in this rude way and say 'You have to get out, you're no longer welcome here.' They didn't want to do that, laughs.

Q: Do you think there was an angle where they might have been thinking, "Well, you know, we're honest men and he might be helpful to get our message across and get it out."

A: You know, I think, more than that,AeP the way I would explain it to them wasn't that my film was going to help them right now in this movement that they have. My pitch to them about filming them was basically, 'Look, there's history to think about. You have this movement. You think it's important. How is it going to be remembered? How is it going to be recorded? This is my job. I'm a documentary filmmaker and I'm writing the first draft of history right here, because this film, if it is successful, if it comes out, is going to be available fifty years from now. People will be able to refer back to it and say, 'Well, there was this movement and they wanted these things.'" So, in a way, that appealed to the more educated and prescient of the group and also there's a strong tendency towards narcissism in a lot of these movements. They like to be filmed, they film themselves all the time.

Q: The shots of the battle in Kufa appear to be from a different camera.

A: Right. There's a 1-minute scene in the film where you see this little bit grainier, little bit rougher footage, which is actually shot by one of the people in the demonstration, because I was at that time driving from Baghdad to Kufa and I didn't arrive until 40-minutes after that firefight had started. So what you have in that scene is a situation where you're seeing visuals shot by one of the people who was in the demonstration and filmed it and filmed people coming back with weapons and starting to fight the Spanish troops, but you're hearing the audio that I recorded of the same skirmish, because at that time you couldn't get close to the base from the main road where I had come in on the taxi. So, it's my audio with someone else's video, but it's completely anonymous. They released it on a video CD and started selling it in the marketplace. It's 320x240, whatever,AeP extremely compressed video CD material and the fact that it blew up to 35mm as well as it did is kind of astounding.

Q: Did you ever take any physical precautions while there? Did you ever wear body armor?

A: No. I never wore anything like that because whenever you do that people think you're a soldier and if you embed with the United States military it's probably a good idea, because if you're with them they already think you're a soldier, but if you're out on the street you don't want people to think you're military, you don't want people to think you're a part of some organization larger than yourself and the minute you have anything that looks like it might be a uniform of some kind, whether it's a bullet proof vest or press vest or insignia of some kind, then immediately people are going to be asking, "Where are you from, what are you doing, what are you part of?" Whereas if you're just a guy with a camera you can always say, 'I'm here making a documentary' and that's it. It's a psychological thing as much as anything. If you're wearing a bullet-proof vest you're sort of inviting people to shoot at you.

Q: Laughs.

A: You know what I mean? You're saying to them, "I'm a person who is afraid of getting shot. I'm afraid of getting shot, because maybe I'm here doing something not quite right." If you approach everything in this kind of totally open way people are less suspicious of you.

Q: Well, despite your good relations with the Sadr organization, you were actually dragged into a court at one point.

A: Yeah, they were kind of disorganized and very nervous all the time, especially after large numbers of them started to get killed by the Americans. This is in the run-up to the siege of Najaf, the siege of the shrine, where they had hundreds of fighters inside the Imam Ali shrine and most of the downtown of the city was destroyed, entire hotel buildings were bombed to the ground by F-16's. And these huge planes, that they had first used in Vietnam, I forget what they're called, the Ghosts or something [Spectre or Spooky], but there were these B-52 sized planes with these large barreled guns coming off the side and whatnot and they started flying these things around Falluja, I think it was the first place they used them, and then they used them again around in Najaf. Just this complete devastating firepower, Apache helicopters and tanks on the periphery of the city, artillery and F-16 bombing going on. I mean, it was a,AeP if you look at photographs of Najaf after the siege, which took place in November, the main street leading up to the shrine where you see the gold dome at the end, that whole street was just knee-high in rubble after the fighting. It was completely filled with the remains of destroyed buildings and it's unfortunate, for the purposes of the film, that I wasn't able to film during that siege and afterwards, because it would have been a very interesting way of concluding the chapter, but I was in the North. In September I had moved up to the North, and I just decided that it was too difficult, in terms of security, although friends of mine were inside the shrine during the siege. I didn't take that risk.

Q: To get back to your 'court appointment'. How did you talk them into letting you go?

A: Well, they basically realized that I was who I said I was and I was doing what I said I was doing. It wasn't a big deal, but it could have been. You never know. These situations, if they get out of hand, they can become very dangerous and especially when people are getting killed and tempers are very high and if you overreact and start arguing, it can become a dangerous situation. Luckily, they just sort of sent me away and said 'you're not welcome' and at that time I basically just tried to keep my cool and say 'Look, we have permission, stamped and signed by your people. There's nothing in these permissions that says we can't go to the cemetery and film and, besides, we weren't really filming, we were just going to see what happened, because we want to know and eventually they just sort of sent us away, but it was just one of those things. Definitely things got worse and worse, in terms of people's tempers and moods and that's what really makes the situation dangerous.

Iraq in Fragments image from openDemocracy.

Iraq In Fragments - James Longley Interview - Pt. 2 - Mohammed of Baghdad

Q: How did you come to meet your first subject, Mohammed Haithem?

A: Mohammed Haithem Majid. You know it's weird, because in the Arab world people go by the name of a tribe like Al-Jiburi or Al-Dulami or something like that and then there is what you call people, it's always like the person's name and then their father's first name and then their grandfather's first name and that's how people are referred to. So, Mohammed Haithem Majid. His name is Mohammed, his father's name is Haithem and his grandfather's name is Majid, which I think is poorly understood in the West and then who knows what his tribe is? But that's how people are identified. I had been to that neighborhood in 2002 when I was there the first time. If you go to my website there's some still photographs of pre-war Baghdad. Some of those still photographs are taken in the same neighborhood in 2002, before the war, and so I think it was a Canadian sculptor who was working in Baghdad then, for some reason, that I met who said 'You're looking for locations in Baghdad to film. You should check out this neighborhood, the Sheikh Omar neighborhood. It's very colorful, there are people working all the time, there's all kinds of welding and building and things going on constantly and it's very atmospheric. You should check it out." So, I went there and took a bunch of pictures before the war and then, after the war, when I was thinking, where am I going to go to find a subject for my first section, I decided just to go back there, because it was a place that I knew already and if you're making a verite documentary film it's important to have a situation where people are working, they're not only going to be interested in you and your camera, they're going to have things to do. So this kind of neighborhood was really perfect for that, because it's a place were there's basically these small one-room shops next to each other for the length of an entire city block or two. And so there's all these characters, they're there constantly every day, the same people, they're always working, they're always up to something or if they're not working they're always sitting around, shooting the shit with each other. So, I went back there and I went from shop to shop with my camera and would take people at random and say, 'I'm making a documentary film, tell me about yourself' and sort of went along looking for good characters, people who were able to speak in front of a camera who had interesting stories. You know, I was looking for a younger person, but I interviewed people from 13, 14 to 20, 25. All men, of course, because in that neighborhood the only people who were out, the only people who were working are men. There are no women. And most of the time you won't even see a girl on the street. Very male. All the women are inside or they're somewhere else. This is the nature of the society. And I came across this kid. I think I was in an adjoining shop and they said, 'Oh, you're looking for a character. You should interview Mohammed.'

And he was like, not exactly the mascot of the neighborhood, but he was a kid who everyone knew because he had been there for years and years, even though he was only eleven. And he had this kind of,AeP he was a little kid, he was someone you looked at and instantly felt this kind of empathy with and he had this kind of charisma, but at the same time,AeP he invited different things at once. On the one hand, he was a little kid, on the other hand he had been working around these older men for years and years and had adopted their way of speaking and their body language and everything else and he was sort of comfortable in that environment and less so in the company of his peers and so he had this very interesting kind of personality and he's constantly daydreaming, he's constantly slipping off into his own little world and he seems to forget about what's going on around him, even though he might be working on something, but at the same time he's in another place and you can sort of see exactly what he's thinking, written on his face. Like you can see that he's thinking all the time. You might not know exactly about what, but you could see him go from being happy to being serious and thoughtful. And that by itself made him kind of interesting as a documentary subject, because in a film while you're basically asking the audience to go into a place they've never been in before, something new that they haven't seen before, it's much easier to do it through the eyes of a young person, of a kid, because you relate to them as a kid. And children see the world in a different way then we do as adults, where we sort of already understand everything and nothing is surprising to us, nothing is new. In the case of a kid it's completely different, they take the world much more seriously and in a much more open-eyed kind of way. Because of Mohammed's personality, you could also see the world through him, because he was constantly reacting to it unconsciously and it wasn't that he was going to be the narrator, who was going to explain the politics or whatever of the situation. He was going to be the lens, the window through which the audience saw this world. That's the way I saw him as a character when I started filming and I pretty much developed it as that. Where there were at least two story strands, about his own personal story and also the things that were happening around him in the bigger society.
Q: Needless to say, he's a very compelling subject. Have you, by any chance, kept in touch with him? Do you have any sense of what he's up to?
A: It's very difficult to keep in touch with most of these people, because there's no,AeP they don't use e-mail, they don't speak English. But I have kept in touch with the translators that I worked with. Some of them have left the country now, but there are others who are still living in Baghdad and they use e-mail and I basically sent one on an errand to go to his neighborhood and find out how he is, back in November, and at that time he was working at his uncle's shop, not his boss, where he was before, and the translator friend of mine said he's still exactly the same only his voice has changed.
Q: So he's still with his uncle's shop?
A: Yeah.
Q: Oh, that's very good. It seemed like he was very happy with that change.
A: Right. Of course, it would have been nicer for him to actually continue in school, which he didn't do, but you know, what can you do. I guess he wasn't really fated to be an educated person.
Q: In the production notes you said that after days of filming Mohammed you would spend evenings translating the material and layering it on an Apple laptop to build a picture of him and the world around him. Was that pre-editing? Were you editing what you had shot?
A: Sometimes. I did edit scenes together before I came back. For example, the alcohol raid scene. I edited a version of that, that's very close to what's in the final film, pretty much right after I filmed it. So the initial edit of that scene was back in February of 2004 and what's in the film is not changed very much at all from that. There are also scenes,AeP the initial edit of Chapter 1, Mohammed's chapter, was 45-minutes. Right now in the film it's a little less than 30. So there was an extra fifteen minutes of material that was cut out. Entire other scenes where there were altercations with the boss, where the boss is slapping him around and accusing him of losing tools and things like that, that are cut out of the film, because of time constraints. But the first 45-minute edit of Chapter 1 I did completely by myself in Iraq and sent out. There was someone leaving, a friend of mine, Aaron Glantz, who was my roommate in Baghdad, and also in Northern Iraq, a radio journalist. He also wrote a book, How America Lost Iraq, and was on a book tour here. Anyway, nice guy. He took a DVD that I had burned of the rough draft of this chapter and brought it back to the United States and it was sent to the Sundance Institute along with a copy of Gaza Strip and a copy of a grant application and that was the first step in getting funding from them, from the documentary fund. So, I was editing the film in Iraq prior to coming back, but the bulk of the work in terms of cutting the film was done here in Seattle.
Q: The film is obviously focused on the Iraqi people, but you do see the US military presence as these, kind of, distant sentinels. What was, if any, your personal relationship with the military? Did you have to interact with them in any way? Did you get know any of the soldiers personally?
A: In the beginning you could, kind of, come up to the US military on the street, the soldiers, and talk with them fairly easily. Then, as time went on, and the relationship between the population and the military worsened, it became more difficult. In the beginning you would see these truckloads of US soldiers going around, open in the back, Humvees and stuff like that, and after a while you would never see that anymore. You wouldn't see soldiers by themselves. I remember in the Summer of 2003 you could see a male and female US soldier in uniform walking together, buying ice cream on the street in Baghdad. There was a completely different atmosphere in the beginning where people were kind of curious, but mostly tolerant of the United States and at that time it felt like, maybe if the US played their cards right, they could get exactly what they wanted, which was a country that was essentially welcoming to them and would be accepting of whatever direction they wanted to try to push the country in. I think it was only because of the total amazing incompetence of the American administration in Washington DC and also in Baghdad that this failed to materialize. Because I think the majority of Iraqis were really willing to give the Americans the benefit of the doubt, much more than, say, the American left was about the war. Most people in Iraq did not like the Saddam Hussein regime, they wanted it to fall. And they were happy that the United States overthrew Saddam Hussein. I mean, that's the reality. The reality for most people, including most of the Shia and lot of the Sunni, ordinary Sunni people who were not involved in the regime. They were perfectly happy to have the government gone, but they were also very surprised that United States came in, overthrew the government, and then just sort of stood around and let everything go to hell. And people did not see this influx of billions of dollars of reconstruction money. The reconstruction that was done was very superficial, painting schools or painting a hospital. But it wasn't like the actual on-the-ground stuff. I mean hospitals were in worse shape after the war than they were under the sanctions period when they really had to struggle just to get basic medications. After the war they weren't getting those medications at all, because the sanctions ended, which meant the oil-for-food program ended, oil production itself was basically stopped in the country for a long period of time. Even now it's only a million barrels a day, which is far less than it was during the 90's under sanctions. And you went from a very bad situation under the regime and under sanctions to an even worse situation, where there was no government at all and no organization to the kind of aid that was coming in, which was far more limited, even than it was under the sanctions period. So, the Iraqis were surprised and disappointed by the kind of structural failures of the occupation. The failure to rebuild the kind of institutions that you would need to stabilize the country internally without having it be a police state, a security-driven state. So, by that I mean, aid distribution, health care, the water system, the electricity system, transportation and whatnot. So it was kind of this amazing lack of organization, lack of planning, and just general incompetence and this sort of attitude of 'you can't do anything yourselves, we won't let you do anything yourselves, but at the same time we are not going to do anything for you, because it has to be done by an Iraqi government and an Iraqi government has not yet been formed.' So they didn't want militias to spring up to do policing, for example, but at the same time they weren't doing any of the police work, so the militias sprang up to do it. And this is just one example. Anyway, the failures of the occupation are myriad and legion and one could go on and on,AeP
Q: If the military wasn't any particular kind of help, were they ever an impediment to you? Did you actually know any soldiers yourself?
A: Well, I had a cousin who was a soldier in Baghdad at the same time that I was there. This guy from the Texas side of my family and he sent me e-mails to say, you know, I'm with the whatever division of whatever doing bomb cleanup or something like that and he was stationed across the Tigris river from me in Baghdad. And I would e-mail back and forth with him. He didn't know anything about what was going on in the country. A year into the occupation he still thought they were looking for weapons of mass destruction when the United States government had already declared the search was over. And he didn't know anything about what was going on outside Baghdad. You know, what roads were open or closed at various times. It became apparent to me that if he was a typical soldier, that the soldiers themselves didn't really have very much idea what was taking place outside their eyesight and earshot. And that was kind of strange. I never saw him when I was in Iraq. They can't go off of their military base and just walk over to your hotel. There's no way for them to do that. And, also, I didn't want to go onto their military base, because there are people watching you, what you do. If you, as an American civilian, are going onto a US military base and coming off of it multiple times, suddenly people are going to say well this guy is involved with the military.
Q: So they weren't ever a help. Were they ever a hindrance to you?
A: A hindrance. No. I tended to stay away from the US military in Iraq. If you wanted to get up-close personal stuff with the US military in a film you basically had to embed with them. It was the only way of doing it. And friends of mine did that, filmmakers, writers and it was interesting material that they got. For the purposes of my film I felt the obvious thing to do for an American in Iraq is to embed with the US military and film the perspective of US soldiers. It's not an easy story to make, but it's easier than trying to do a film about the Iraqis themselves, because you have these English speaking characters that everyone can identify with. It fits into every war movie you've ever seen. It's very easy to conceptualize it, to understand it. It's an easier movie to make. So, I basically figured that there would be people making this movie and I wasn't wrong. There are at least two feature documentaries released in the United States, Gunner Palace and Occupation: Dreamland that focus entirely on the US military presence. And of course there was this PBS Frontline series which is all about the US military and then there were fictional accounts while the war was still going on like Over There, whatever this television show that was produced, that's maybe still being produced, I'm not sure. So this perspective is really covered and I just decided a) I don't want to do what everyone else is doing, even though, who knows, maybe I'll do it better, maybe I'll do it worse, but it's going to be done already and no one is going to pay attention to my movie if I come out a year after these other films and it's the same kind of subject and b) it's a security issue. Like I say, if you spend time going in and out of US military installations, that is going to be very difficult for you to reconcile with people coming to ask you 'what the hell are you doing.' No one's going to believe you if you say you're making a documentary about the US military. Everyone's going to think you are a spy for them or something else. So, it's a hairy situation, security-wise, to film the US military and also because the US military are targeted by the insurgency. So, as many journalists have discovered, if you travel around with US military you wind up in the middle of a roadside bombing, or something like that, and it's a dangerous thing. Also, there's another reason, which is that the US military was spending a lot of time going on raids, breaking into people's houses, arresting people in the dead of night, putting bags over their heads and taking them to prison without trial and it's not that isn't an important story that you shouldn't document, but after having spent a long time living in Iraq with Iraqis in a civilian house. The house of one of my translators, I lived nine months there. You started to feel very uncomfortable with the idea of being with a band of Americans, who don't really know that much about the local culture, breaking into people's houses that they don't know, walking all over their floor with their boots on, and taking away the men. I didn't want to do that, even as a journalist not connected to the military.
Q: Did they ever get in your way, did they ever prevent you from doing anything?
A: Well, if I had wanted to go to Falluja, for example, it would have been during the siege of April of 2004. It would have been very difficult, because the US military was blocking off the roads. However, I didn't try to do that, not because of the US military, but because of the local insurgency, because they were not necessarily respecting the civilian status of journalists and that situation became worse and worse. Right now you can't walk down the street in Baghdad securely as a foreign civilian, but at that time it was sort of the beginning of the end and it was clear that, after several people were kidnapped and executed and journalists were being mowed down in their cars, going from one place to another, and friends of mine were being kidnapped. It was clear that the bigger worry was the insurgency. I mean, if you're a journalist in a war zone, most of the time, I think, people who go into that kind of a situation are willing to accept a fairly high level of risk and most of the time that level of acceptable risk includes all the risks that the ordinary civilian population faces on a day-to-day basis, whether it's being shot at a checkpoint or getting blown up by a car bomb driving down the street or what have you. These risks are real, everyone lives with these risks. So, you figure that a lot of civilians are getting killed every single day in Baghdad, well it's possible you also will be killed by chance, because of the fighting back and forth and the explosions and whatnot. That's, I think, by most conflict journalists or war journalists, considered an acceptable level of risk that you can live with, because everybody in this society is living with that. However, when it becomes a situation where, because you're a foreigner, because you're a journalist, you're being singled out and targeted for kidnapping or attack, suddenly that's a completely different level of risk that you are involved with and I think that most people start to draw the line around there. I remember, right after the war, there was a war correspondent, who had covered everything from Kosovo to god-knows back into the Central American wars of the 80's, who was in Baghdad and I remember him saying 'when they kill the first journalist I'm out of here.',AeP laughs. And that's because, you know, he knows how it's going to go. Once you start killing journalists, then it's like there is this line that gets broken and it suddenly becomes socially acceptable to,AeP the society begins to sort of assume that journalists are fair game as well in this conflict and once you lose that layer of invincibility [snaps fingers] it's all over and you're going to be targeted just like the military is targeted.
Q: Were you generally perceived as being a journalist? Did people identify you that way?
A: Yeah, and that's also to the credit of the translators that I worked with. They were very quick to tell everyone I was a journalist. And I took pains to adopt a local style of dress and had a beard and moved as much as possible around in the same way as local people and did all the proper greetings and the right body language and everything else and made people as comfortable as possible with my presence. And in most situations I tried not to speak a lot of English. So, it's not like people weren't aware that you were probably a foreigner, but you could sort of slip through a little bit and if you didn't make this big wake around you as you moved through a place, you could do a lot more with a lot less risk.
Q: You seem to have had a remarkable level of access. One thing I was curious about was, getting back to the first part of the film, we see Mohammed largely at his work place and I only recall one brief moment where he appears to be in his house, I think he's washing or something. Was it, in general, difficult for you to get into people's homes? There's not really a lot of home life in the film.
A: Well that's true, particularly in the second chapter which deals more with the political- religious movement and uprising and is a lot less character based. In the first chapter I did film hours of material in Mohammed's house and filmed interviews with his grandmother, but it's mainly just a question that you have 30-minutes, you have to tell the story, is the stuff you have of him in the house advancing the story or not and in this case it really wasn't most of the time. And so, I have a couple of shots of him in the house washing up, changing his clothes and going to school, this kind of material, and I could have included more, but it didn't seem necessary for the story and ultimately, when you're cutting things down and really, weighing every single scene and shot, you start to cut out a lot of the shots where they're sitting around at home watching television.
Q: Again, you seem to have really gained a lot of access, even in moments where you're capturing conversations with people who are obviously anti-American. Did they just perceive you as 'Oh, you're an okay guy, we don't mean this personally.'
A: In all cases in the film where people are talking about America, American policy, they're talking about it in a sort of big, abstract way, they're not necessarily talking about individual Americans and most of the time in the Middle East, though there is a lot of anti-American, anti-West sentiment, it's all to do with the politics of US relations with the Middle East, the fact that the United States supports a lot of governments that people don't like, the Egyptian government, the Jordanian government, the Moroccan government, the Tunisian government, the Libyan government and on and on. Most people don't really like these governments. With exceptions, you know, they're police states and the United States is supporting them and people don't like the United States for that reason. They also don't like the United States because it does a lot of nasty things, like bombing cities into the ground and killing a lot of Arab civilians and that's all shown very clearly in the local media. So there's a very different perception of America in the Middle East than there is of America in the United States vis a vis the Middle East. This is just the reality. In this country we tend to shut our eyes to the situation and it's just much easier for us to imagine that we're just these benevolent people who only mean well, but on the ground things sometimes play out very differently and there's a lot of things that are perceived as hypocritical as to what the United States says about the Middle East and what the United States actually does in the Middle East, but on an individual level it's a different story. I mean, if you go and you're polite and you show respect, then you can get away with quite a bit and people will treat you well.

Iraq In Fragments - James Longley Interview Pt. 1 - Introduction & Background

One of the highlights of Sundance this year was Iraq In Fragments, a documentary by local filmmaker James Longley. Described by Tim Appelo as "a gorgeous tone poem drawn from about 300 hours of incredibly privileged footage" the film documents post-war Iraq in three acts, building a vivid picture of a country pulled in different directions by religion and ethnicity. Filmed in verite style, with no scripted narration, the film explores the lives of ordinary Iraqis. Part One follows Mohammed Haithem, an 11-year-old auto mechanic in the mixed Sheik Omar neighborhood in the heart of old Baghdad. Part Two is filmed inside the Shiite political/religious movement of Moqtada Sadr, traveling between Naseriyah and the holy city of Najaf. Part Three follows Iraqi Kurds as they assert their bid for independence and focuses on two boys and their fathers, who live on neighboring farms.

The film, which will be showing at The Seattle Arab and Iranian Film Festival on March 31st at 7:00, at the Cinerama, won three awards at Sundance for editing, directing and cinematography. As well as the film is directed and edited it is the third award that should be of special note. The film was beautifully shot and is as visually compelling as it is narratively interesting.

I interviewed James Longley on February 6th. He was very gracious, dropping by my office a week or so before to lend me a copy of the film. He was also incredibly generous with his time, as the length of this interview will attest. I've decided to break up the interview into six parts. An introductory section that focuses on his background and the events leading up to his first days of shooting in Baghdad, a separate section for each chapter of the film, a technical section that focuses on aspects of production and a final section of random and concluding questions.

BACKGROUND
Q: I'd like to begin by quoting a LA Weekly piece by Ella Taylor. Have you been reading her Sundance coverage?
A: Some of it.
Q: In her wrap-up of this year's Sundance documentaries she has a comment on your film that I'd love to get your reaction to. "Though it ended up carrying off three festival awards (directing, cinematography and editing), Iraq in Fragments may well be umarketably complex." Is your film unmarketably complex?
A: Well, I think if you look at this movie in the framework of Hollywood product, it's definitely more information to absorb than National Lampoon's Vegas Vacation. This is not light family comedy. On the other hand, I think that viewers in this country, especially on issues of Middle East foreign policy, are really interested in understanding things in a more complex way and having more than this kind of two-dimensional media output that we're typically exposed to. In that way it makes it more marketable. Furthermore, I should add that the one or two mixed reviews of the film, their negative comment (like the initial review in Variety) was that it was too simplistic. So, it's the question of who are you going to please. I think the film is riding the edge of what people are able to absorb in a 94-minute movie in terms of the visual, political information that's in it. So, I didn't want to go overboard and give people an entire history of Iraqi politics or an exhaustive account of the Saddam Hussein genocide campaign against the Kurds in 1988, although I have that material. I filmed those interviews. But in the film, I'm limiting the amount of information to make it something people can actually watch and it's probably more than people would get the first time around. But it's a difficult balancing act. As a filmmaker, as an editor, how much do you give people? I have a lot more than what's in the film.
Q: If HBO or Frontline were to approach you and say, "We would love to run your piece, we understand that you initially had six stories and cut it down to three." Would you be willing to restore the other three stories and create a three-hour version for broadcast?
A: I don't think it would be of service to the film. The material that's cut out of the film, it varies. There's some of it that belongs within the structure of a film like this and was cut out because of time constraints and because the film is already very complicated and also because to include would have broken the three-part structure that falls along the lines that people understand of the Sunnis, the Shiites and the Kurds. But I don't think it would improve the movie as such. I think that it's possible to take the material that's not used in the film and make stand-alone pieces to augment the film as DVD special features or what-have-you, but I don't think it would improve the movie by including an extra 30-minute episode, which I have. We edited a 30-minute segment that's not in the film. Completely different than what's in the film.
Q: I'd like to step back a little and go a little into your background. Before doing Iraq in Fragments you did Gaza Strip and prior to that you studied film and Russian at the University of Rochester and Wesleyan and the All-Russian Institute of Cinematography in Moscow. Then you worked as a film projectionist, an English language teacher, a newspaper copy editor and a web designer. What was it, if anything, in those experiences that prepared you to go to the Gaza Strip and make a film?
A: There wasn't anything particular in those non-filmic experiences that, with exception perhaps of being a projectionist, that was a direct preparation for working in the Gaza Strip,AeP laughs. If you've never worked in a combat zone before and if you've never been in the Middle East before and you've never really had that much exposure to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before, there's nothing that can really prepare you,AeP laughs.
Q: Laughs,AeP What exactly was it that put into your mind that, 'Hm... going to the Gaza Strip, that's something I can do.'
A: Well, I only wanted to be a documentary filmmaker since university. I made this 25-minute b&w cinemascope documentary in Moscow, Portrait of Boy With Dog, which I co-directed with a friend of mine, Robin Hessman and she and I had gone to high school together in Massachusetts, prep school really, and we both got onto this exchange program at the Moscow State Cinematography Institute [VGIK], which was the big film school of the Soviet Union and while we were there we had a grant from Eastman Kodak, they gave us 5,000 meters of 5222 b&w 35mm stock and we shot that, plus a little Soviet film that we had, and made this 25-minute film, which won the Student Academy Award in 1994. We made it when we were juniors, actually, and it wasn't accepted as my thesis film, because it was made during my junior year, but the film was well received. It's still being used, I think, to this day at the Stanford University graduate documentary program as one of their examples of student documentary film and I ran into a few students from there who say every year they show it to the class. So, anyway, that's all I really wanted to do. I enjoy filmmaking in general, I like the process of shooting, I like the process of editing, but beyond that I really like documentary, because it's potentially more important than fiction filmmaking, although that's a broad generalization, but there's a much more direct relationship between the things that you may care about in the real world and what you can do as a filmmaker. I mean, if you are able to make fiction films, because you're very talented and very lucky and you can get the funding to do it and you can make a film like The Battle of Algiers or you can make a film like this film about pharmaceutical companies in Africa,AeP you know,AeP
Q: Oh yeah, the uh,AeP the one that was based on the,AeP laughs.
A: It has one of those weird names that you can't remember.
Q: Yeah, it's uh,AeP laughs. I know the one you're referring to with Ralph Fiennes.
A: The Constant Gardener. These are fiction films that deal with actual social issues of importance and they broaden people's horizons and get them interested in the issues and you can do this as a fiction filmmaker. There's no reason you can't, but the thing with documentary is you don't need $20-million or what-have-you to go out and shoot a film about a real issue that's happening right now. If you want to do a documentary that's based entirely on archival material or that's going to involve a lot of music, that you have to purchase the rights to, then suddenly you're talking about a million-dollar film. If you're willing to go out with a camera to Southern Sudan and film the migration of a Sudanese refugee woman as she leaves the country and goes to Cairo and faces the bureaucracy of Egypt and you're willing to put in four years of your life and make a movie like that, you can do it pretty cheaply, if you're willing to do the work yourself and you know how to do the actual filmmaking. So, it allows you to a) be a filmmaker b) approach issues that you feel are important and that you want people to know more about and issues that you personally would like to know more about and learn more about in the process of making the film. It allows you to do all of this and simultaneously explore the world around you and as a lifestyle you can't beat it with a stick. I mean, I can't think of anything I'd rather do and I've felt that way since I was an undergraduate. So, all of this stuff in-between, that's just me biding my time until they invented cheap digital cameras,AeP laughs.
Q: It's kind of an envious moment, because the technology has reached the point where you can get a camera like the Panasonic DVX-100A for $4,000-$5,000 that has the quality it has. It's momentous. In the past, filmmakers would have had to have paid way more money to get a camera of comparable quality.
A: Right. When I was going to college the only way to get that kind of quality was to shoot on 16mm, which is not so expensive, but it's definitely more than I can afford. Talk about 300-hours of material,AeP
Q: Yeah, and the physical aspect of all those rolls of film,AeP
A: Hauling cans of film around in the desert, you can't do it. You have to have a crew, you have to have a separate sound-guy, you have to have this expensive camera. 16mm sound cameras are upwards of $50,000. So, suddenly, you have that capability where you can get that kind of image that approaches the quality of a 16mm film print or a blowup to 35mm. Being able to shoot on the DVX-100 or 100A in 24p Advanced, it's like having a 16mm synch-sound camera where an hour of film or six rolls of film costs $4 and where you can immediately get this visual feedback of what you're shooting, you don't have go to the lab, you can watch it immediately afterwards and see if you got what you needed and that's a revolution. That means anybody who really wants to can go out and make a film and that's the democratization of the entire filmmaking process, especially for documentaries, because you don't need the crew, you don't need the actors, you don't need to buy the script. Of course, there are ways to make a fiction film just as cheaply as a documentary, but the limitations are greater.
Q: To get back to the outset of this project. You went initially with Congressman McDermott and then you had some difficulties staying in the country and they, more or less, tossed you out.
A: Well, they do it in this passive way. They give you a visa for ten days. If you're lucky and you sweet-talk people, you can get it extended for two-weeks. So, you're doing this day-by-day thing. Meanwhile, they're not really giving you permission to film anything, because it's not to their advantage that you film anything. They don't care and if you film something embarrassing to them and if they were the responsible government official then they'll get in trouble. So it's to their advantage that you not do any work and basically leave the country with essentially nothing. And this is what happened to me before the war. I had approached them before, in September of 2002,AeP and when I got into the country in February 2003, right before the war, it was the same story where, on the one hand, they would say we really want all of you foreign journalists to tell the story of the Iraqis and why aren't you showing the world what Iraq is really like and, at the same time, they were completely not interested in giving you any access. So, like most regimes, they were only interested in keeping themselves in power and when they could already foresee that the regime they were part of was going to fall, they were really only interested in collecting as much money as they could to live through the period following the war where no-one was going to have any work and everything was going to be scarce. So they were only interested in big media organizations that could pay them a lot of money as bribes to stay in the country and have permission to work.
Q: You did finally manage to get back in April 2003 after the fall of Baghdad. How soon after the fall did you return?
A: Pretty soon. I basically saw the statue of Saddam Hussein falling on television. I was in Cairo at the time. I waited out the war in Cairo, because Amman was just so deadly boring and I had a friend in Cairo, so as soon as I had seen the regime had fallen and that the border would probably be open I just bought a plane ticket from Cairo back to Amman and then got a car and drove to Iraq. The border was wide open. Anyone could go. You could go without a passport. You didn't need a visa, certainly.
Q: Did you capture any of the scenes of the postwar chaos, the looting, etc.?
A: Well, I got material of various ministries burning and you would see some of the looting going on, but those moments when people were running through the Baghdad Art Museum, those moments were actually occurring during the war as soon as the regime had fallen. It was when the troops first entered Baghdad, within a day you had this wild looting situation and after that things kind of settled down a little bit, so by the time I got there, a week or two later, you wouldn't see people scampering down the sidewalk with light fixtures or whatever.
Q: Did you have an interpreter the entire time you were there?
A: Yeah, if you look at the credits, there's twelve different interpreter/translator/fixer people I worked with over the space of those two years, some of them more than others.
Q: Did you develop any language skills yourself?
A: I could get around in Baghdad. If I needed to get in a taxi and go from one end of town to another I could do it. If I needed to get in a taxi and drive to Northern Iraq, I could do it. I developed more comprehension than actual speaking skills and my reading skills were basically zero in Arabic, because I never studied the language formally, much to my chagrin and shame,AeP and Kurdish is the same.
Q: Does that mean your interaction with all your subjects was mediated through an interpreter?
A: Well, yes and no. Sometimes I would spend time with people without an interpreter. In the North, for example, I'd spend the night over at people's houses with no interpreter present and I was able to communicate with them enough to do that kind of thing. But yes, most of the time, I was kind of this mute figure and it actually sort of helped me, because when you don't have this immediate interaction with people, where it's always mediated through a local person, they hear your questions or your comments through someone who's speaking the local language as a native, and they don't think of you so much as this foreigner. In fact, they don't think of you so much at all. So you're kind of like this guy who's there, who they like, who they know, but they don't really talk with and you have a camera and you're hanging out and if they could talk with you directly it would make it more difficult, because they'd turn to you and say 'Hey James what do you think about this? What do you think about that?' You'd become part of the conversation. But because they know that you can't understand what they're saying, most of the time, at least the details of what they're saying, and that you can't talk with them, they don't try to include you in the conversation and in the case of being able to film people's interactions with each other, this is actually very helpful, because you become like this piece of furniture hanging out there.
Q: Where you filming alone the whole time? The credits list a Margaret Longley as 2nd Unit. Is she your wife?
A: No, that's my little sister. She was 23. She went to Northern Iraq for the purpose of filming women's stories, because it was harder for me to have that access.
Q: The film is very male-centric. The subjects and voices are all men and boys. Was that because, as you say, it would have been personally difficult for you to have gotten those stories from women?
A: In part. However, the chapter we edited down from 40-hours of material and then cut from the film, which is the story of this Sunni farming family South of Baghdad, is very female-centric. It's about this mother of these children and one of them is dying of AIDS and it's her battle, you know, her husband is kind of uneducated, she's sort of educated and she's fighting to get medical care for her son and compensation from the ministry of health. This is actually a very interesting story that's cut from the film. If it had been included, then no one would have this reaction to the film, that this is very male-centric, because there would be this strong, intelligent woman's voice in the movie, but we had to weigh everything and basically decided it's a great chapter by itself, but it doesn't help the film. It's a great story, but it doesn't work in the movie, it works as its own piece. So, there are things like that. Then, I spent a long time filming interviews with women in a women's shelter in Arbil, who were escaping honor killings by their families and I filmed an episode of one woman who was having a court case, seeking divorce from her husband, who was ultimately unsuccessful. So, things like this, had they been included in the movie (as well the interviews I did with survivors of the 1988 Anfal campaign, which were at least 50% women) the perception of it being a very male-voiced film wouldn't be there. But it just happens that often in Iraq and a place like that you can either,AeP when you're with the guys you're with the guys and you won't get anything of the women. If you're with the women, you're with the women and you won't get anything from the guys. And it just happens that the kind of substantive stories that made up this three-part structure happen to be guy-centric stories and, by chance, it worked out that way, because I have the material to have women's voices in the film, but it didn't seem to fit within the context of this movie.
Q: Mostly when you see women in the film they're either just in the street or they're school teachers. The one part where I really felt they had a presence was in the Kurdish region where you saw them working as poll-workers during the election.
A: Although, If you had filmed the elections in Baghdad you would have probably have seen the same thing.
Q: And then there's that one scene in the middle section where you have that woman who's arguing with the militia member and she was very feisty and,AeP I quite liked her actually.

Image from the IMDb (James Longley at an event for Iraq in Fragments).