Maybe my hopes were too high for this movie, but in the end it was a let-down. First, a few good things I can say about it: The images are great, footage is interesting and fresh. As others mentioned, it is a documentary following Iraqis and only Iraqis in a country torn by war, and that angle itself is somehow novel for what is shaping up to be the "Iraqi Documentary" genre.That being said, I have yet to see the relevance of following (for thirty minutes!) the life of a kid who's very special among his peers in that it has to repeat first grade four times. If this were a documentary about how the Iraqi education system accommodates students with disabilities, then the first fragment would be right on. But that wasn't the intent of the movie, as far as I can tell. I expected the documentary to give me a glimpse into the life of an average Iraqi, and - especially the first fragment, which for me set the mood for the entire movie - failed to do that.Overall the movie lacks cohesive glue. It's a collection of (albeit beautifully shot) fragments clobbered together. Maybe more bake time in the editing room could have made a difference, who knows... It feels to me like one could splice in at any point footage of a cat crossing the road, and the movie would not be worse for it. Especially if you like cats.

John Langely somehow created amazing shots all the while risking his life daily in a war zone where white skin can be a death sentence. I recommend this film not just to the documentary crowd, but to anyone interested in the Iraq war. Sometimes the shots are so breath-taking you don't believe it's reality, it is too perfect, even beautiful. I would have called this film, Iraq in people, because thats what I saw in this film, an intimate, very personal look at the struggles of people, who live in a war. The relationship between the boy(Muhammad) and his boss is hard to watch. The boy admires him like a father, but the man puts him down often and with no visible regret when he breaks the boy down because he can't spell his father's name after 4 years of school.

Well, I finally found the very best documentary from 2006. This exploration of Iraq is reminiscent of the beautiful ethnographic documentaries (and faux-documentaries) of pioneer Robert J. Flaherty. The images are awe-inspiring and completely indelible. The film is broken into three parts. In the first segment, we follow the life of an 11 year-old Sunni boy in Baghdad. The second depicts Shia Muslims in Southern Iraq, particularly the followers of Moqtada al-Sadr. And the third follows a Kurdish family in Northern Iraq. Unlike Flaherty's documentaries, Longley's film is entirely real. The man spent two years wandering Iraq by himself with a camera starting in April of 2003, less than a month after George W. Bush famously declared that major military operations were complete. He's a white man, and it's stunning that he was able to infiltrate these people and film them on such an intimate level. The first and third segments probably held their own danger, but the second segment is especially impressive. How in Hell was Langley able to accompany Shi'ites as they kidnapped alcohol-peddling shopkeepers? It's mind-boggling. This is a rare documentary that is both informative and incredibly cinematic. As a whole, I think Iraq in Fragments comes pretty close to being a masterpiece. There's a silhouetted sequence of some Kurdish kids burning a tractor tire that is one of the most gorgeous shots I've ever seen. Definitely one of the best films of 2006.

While the cinematography is stunningly gorgeous, I found "Iraq in Fragments" to be mostly very disappointing, a shallow rehash of stereotypes of the 3 main sections of Iraq.First we get a little boy who's failed the first grade 2 or 3 times and professes to be loved and well-cared for by a boss who is rough and bullying to him, behavior that would be clearly labeled as abusive in the US. Granted in a much harsher, more violent society little Muhammed may be relatively well-off. But this roughness, the constant low-level violence and the threat of much worse, the cycle of failure and nostalgia for Saddam Hussein (Yes, he was terrible, but now is so much worse, they all say.) is simply what we already "know" from western press reports from the Sunni Arabs.The Shi'ite segment shows rough "justice" as suspects in a minor crime are kept imprisoned in blindfolds by what appears to be a vigilante squad. Here we see the prayers, processions, funerals, self-flagellation – oh, those exotically religious Shi'ites! And the Kurds are shown as struggling to develop democracy. The little boy who is the focus has auburn highlights in his hair, showing these Kurds to be more western than the Arabs. Montage shots of boys in a field recall Eisenstein, images of youthful dreams of building a new future.The visual lessons of Eisenstein are much displayed here with wonderful montages, and the composition of this film alone makes it well worth watching. It is one of the most beautifully shot movies I've seen in a long time. Still, the content seems to be so much western hand-wringing over Arab violence, and the eventual dismemberment of the country (implied in the title) and hope for Kurdish democracy. (And here is the simplistic emotional uplift that softens the rest of the film.) The aesthetics of the movie are seductive and one can feel the visual poetry as being somehow more than that. Alas, it isn't. While the close presence and some of the time spent with individuals, particularly the young Sunni Arab and Kurdish boys, provide a sense of personal intimacy, they reveal no depth or complexity to the situations they live in, or any sense either of what holds Iraq together or what's tearing it apart. The framing of these three sections offers a sense of boundary and inevitability, objectifying the subjects, telling us nothing new about them or their situation, and encouraging distance and complacency among western viewers.