An Angle on Iraq In Fragments Film: Optimism is in the Eye of the Beholder

The full length 97 minutes award winning documentary was directed by James Longley, I saw a screening in Cinema Du Parc in Montreal on June 11, 2007. After the screening, the gentleman who sat next to me in the theatre thought it was optimistic because he saw shots of highly attended elections in Kurdistan. I had the chance of commenting during the discussion period and noted that shots of the same elections showed one of the polls supervisors was instructing a voter to vote specifically for the Kurdish list, many of those who were present at the screening obviously noticed the same. The shot was repeated and I noticed another shot where the Kurdish police picked up a man in Arabic dress from the crowded voters’ line and sent him away before he got to the polls. I was uncharacteristically pessimistic, I could only imagine the process in other, more contested, parts of Iraq. We need more openness: video cameras on-line in every election booth in Iraq of the future.

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