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Documentary filmmaker James Longley directed the Sundance award-winning “Iraq in Fragments,

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Longley spent two years in Iraq gathering footage for the film.

“People who work in the conditions of war are very special.”

Or so says UCLA documentary film Professor Marina Goldovskaya, referring to James Longley, director of the documentary “Iraq in Fragments.”

Winner of the Sundance Film Festival’s awards for Best Director, Best Editing and Best Cinematography, Longley’s “Iraq in Fragments” opened in Los Angeles on Friday at the Nuart Theater. Longley spoke in Goldovskaya’s class on Tuesday to a crowd of enamoured students.

Also the director of the 2001 documentary “Gaza Strip,” which features the lives of Palestinians in Gaza, Longley was pleasantly surprised with the success of his film.

“If you get your film into the festival, as far as I’m concerned you made it,” he said. “And anything else is icing on the cake, and I really did not expect it to do as well as it did.”

The new documentary film focuses on the lives of ordinary Iraqi people and the economic, religious and political turmoil that divides them into fragments. Longley spent two years, from 2003 to 2005, in Iraq gathering 300 hours of footage and 1,600 pages of transcribed and translated text for the film.

“I hope that my students will learn (from the film) that they have to take very difficult universal issues, and they have to do everything they can to help our country to move on,” Goldovskaya said.

“Iraq in Fragments” is not a war documentary, and, according to Longley, it was never meant to be.

“In this country we don’t have a lot of opportunity to see what Iraq is like on the ground from the point of view of ordinary Iraqis, and I hope the film gives people that window,” Longley said. “My job in making the film was to convey the views of the people that I was filming and the world that they were living in.”

The film focuses on fragmentation in every sense of the word.

“The whole society is breaking into pieces and no one knows what to do,” Longley said.

“It’s this kind of low-level civil war all the time and yet people are still trying to carry on with their ordinary lives.”

The fragmentary structure of the film also mirrors the content. It’s divided into three distinct stories, with each tale focusing on a different individual or group of individuals as they carry on with their daily lives amid the chaos of war.

“(Iraq’s) defining characteristic is that it’s a country on the brink of disillusionment of fragmentation,” the filmmaker said. “It made sense to film in different parts of the country and to see this kind of fragmentation in process.”

The first fragment follows 11-year-old Mohammed in Baghdad as he struggles between pursuing an education and working to support his family. The second is the most political, following protestors in Shiite cities and men beaten under suspect of selling alcohol in the streets. The final section involves a peaceful Kurdish family and its hope for the future.

“Iraq is probably the most stressful place in the world. ... You are always thinking that you may in fact really be killed,” Longley said.

Longley, who also serves as the film’s cinematographer, editor and composer, attributed much of his film’s success to his patience and elongated stay in Iraq, which allotted him the time to cautiously acquaint himself with the surrounding community.

“When most people might shoot an entire documentary, I’m just getting to know them,” Longley said.

“That’s the way to avoid problems, being a foreigner, is that you have to let them know what you’re all about and let them make a separation between who you are and whatever possibly bad feelings they may have about the United States.”

Instead of focusing on the extraordinary circumstances of the war, Longley emphasizes the seemingly ordinary life of those affected by it.

It is when tears trail down young Mohammed’s face, Shiite activists bow their heads to the ground in worship, and Kurdish children engage in a lighthearted snowball fight, that the intimacy between Longley and his subject matter becomes wholly apparent.

“You can feel the tension,” Goldovskaya said. “You can feel the people’s lives.”