I watched the elegant documentary, "My Country, My Country," by Laura Poitras, about life surrounding the 2005 elections in Iraq. Poitras, present for a Q&A after the screening, has the serious demeanor of someone who has just left behind a world of trauma and violence. In "My Country," she observes the preparations for the election through both the lens of a Sunni doctor and his family as he campaigns for a seat in the new National Assembly and the side of the military and logistical preparations for the elections by the occupying forces.
As audience members launched into question-cum-diatribes on the danger of the rise of Iraq's Shi'i majority as a satelite of Iranian strategic influence, their language, on its non-human scale, couldn't have clashed more with that of Poitras' film - which was simply that of one human telling the tragic stories of her fellow humans.
Poitras did not travel with an interpreter and is not, to my knowledge, conversant in Arabic. Yet somehow, as if to confirm her film's message, she was able to capture the sincerest and rawest of interactions around her and compose these fragments in a way that conveys more than the sum of its parts, something which the international media has failed to do when covering this war.
This documentary does not drown in familiar repetitions of the appalling scope of the war's damage. Instead, it takes us to Baghdad and calls for help in such a reasonable and sustained way that it is impossible to ignore. As the film's subjects go about their lives with violence incessantly rumbling on their doorstep, we can't help to try to take some of their burden with us. As Doctor Riyadh and his family campaign, treat patients, go to school, eat family meals, vote, swat at flies, shave, get married, and live through war, we let their lives and the backdrop of violence seep into us, as the director herself must have done over the course of her year in Iraq.