The Stranger

The Stranger gave local filmmaker James Longley the 2006 Genius Award largely on the merits of this truly astonishing film (which was then nominated for an Academy Award). Longley's digital video (blown up into creamy 35 mm) makes the colors pop; and it's hard to count the ways Iraq in Fragments departs from the standard photojournalistic techniques for documenting a war. There are its highly psychological portraits of children, who have nothing to do with the politics of the region and little interest in the religious and ethnic divisions that are pulling the country apart. The process of shooting is hands-off, in the cinéma vérité tradition; but during editing, the footage turns in on itself, burrowing into the minds of its characters through asynchronous voiceover, provided by the subjects themselves. At the same time, the footage of blood-spattered Shiite religious observance and a vigilante attack on alcohol vendors in Nasiriyah is the stuff of traditional, daredevil war correspondence. Iraq in Fragments bears more relation to the close-range reporting of Washington Post Pulitzer Prize-winner Anthony Shadid (whom Longley met while they were both in Iraq) than it does to any of the other documentaries about the war. By Annie Wagner