A documentary by James Longley. Unrated. In Arabic and Kurdish with English subtitles. Plays Friday to next Thursday (January 26 to February 1), except Saturday (January 27), at the Vancity Theatre

The title of Iraq in Fragments may get more accurate every day, but those fragments speak not just to the curse of that benighted country but to its future as well. An impressionistic documentary that eschews historical context and ignores the too-loud voices of occupying Americans, the film is broken, as Iraq may soon be, into three distinct parts.

The first settles on a poor Baghdad neighbourhood, focusing on Mohammed Haithem, an 11-year-old Sunni who drops out of school to support his family working for a gruff, opinionated auto mechanic who alternately threatens and encourages him. Writer-director James Longley, who shot his footage in a three-year period since the invasion, had the stamina to get in tight in many tricky places; he encourages his subjects to speak at length, sometimes to the camera and sometimes over kaleidoscopic editing that can prove as wearying as it is beautiful.

The second section moves among the Shiah of Sadr City. (Moqtada Sadr himself is glimpsed several times, glowering at the incredibly close camera.) Stereotypes are broken in a long council sequence, in which militants, professionals, and progressives knowledgeably argue the merits of differing responses to the American occupation, with most participants (in the early postwar period) wanting to give politics a real shot for a change. But “there are plenty of little Saddams,” says one hapless street vendor brutally beaten by cigarette-smoking fundamentalists for selling alcohol.

Offering some relief, the final chapter moves back to childhood as it follows two Kurdish boys, only a little older than Haithem, contemplating life without Baathists or Americans. This segment, filmed in the north far from the fighting in a perpetually golden light, is downright bucolic compared with the rest. But there’s an ominous sense of foreboding lingering overhead, along with the toxic smoke of burning tires.

Whatever your response to the highly manipulated imagery, supported by an undertow of Longley’s spare, Steve Reich–like music and Arabic chanting, Fragments has a visceral, ambiguous beauty that makes you feel like you’ve actually been to a place that is usually only visited in ignorance and anger.