Sari's Mother

just saw this short documentary film at IDFA in amsterdam. very impressed. like in Iraq in Fragments, director Longley is doing something very rare and wonderful for documentary. he is creating a work of real cinema. film not only as document and information, but as art, as human expression - actually like expressionism in style.

this film is about a woman taking care of her ill son in Iraq, but is also about a lot more. it is a political film without being political on the surface. but all the layers are there -- there is a lot going on just below the surface in this film. another great work of the New Documentary Cinema!

Reviewed at its 3rd and final screening Friday Sept. 15, 2006 at the Varsity 7 theatre during its World Premiere run at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).

This is a 22 minute short and is apparently an outtake from the same director's Iraq in Fragments film which contains 3 other portraits of Iraqi people in recent times. Fragments won Best Director, Cinematography and Editing in the Documentary category at Sundance in Jan. 2006 but was mysteriously itself absent from TIFF this year.

Sari's Mother is well made and shows the heartbreaking situation of a 10 year old boy (who looks 5 years old in terms of growth) who had contracted AIDS through a blood/plasma transfusion and the circumstances at his family farm and how his mother with a brave and forced smiling face tries to get medical care through a broken down medical system where bureaucracy still reigns crazily supreme regardless.

Director was not in attendance for a Q&A.

With the increased access to digital camcorders, everyone and their brother is taking a stab at making their own films. Whereas this fortunately puts movie-making and truth-telling in the hands of the masses, it also creates some amazingly artless although sincere statements. It takes a director like James Longley to remind us that film-making can be an art, that documentaries don't have to be cold talking heads and that form is as essential as content. His lovingly created story of an Iraqi mother tending to her young children, one of them with AIDS, is a beautifully edited and photographed gem. With little dialog, but carefully framed sequences, this short film is more effective than many features. Reminiscent of the early humanist works of legendary documentarist Robert Flaherty, Longley's films should be necessary homework for all budding filmmakers. The tragedy here is that this moving 22 minute film will be almost impossible for anyone to see, unless someone like Sundance decides to pick it up. In the meantime Gaza Strip and Iraq in Fragments might be easier to acquire.