Stuart Klawans writes of James Longley's Iraq in Fragments: "No truth about the war can be found in [the film]. Longley discovers only truths—in individuals, in masses of people, in landscapes—that fit together provisionally, if at all. That is the heartbreaking lesson of Iraq in Fragments, and its indispensable art." Sari's Mother, a short work Longley culled from unused footage captured during the Iraq in Fragments shoot, follows a similar tack, though where Klawans might intuit profound heartbreak, I sense a vague and problematic reliance on aural/visual poetics. Taken on its own, Sari's Mother is impressive only in its technical abstraction, in the way, for example, that Longley (working as his own cameraman and sound recordist) uses the audio tracks of his interview footage as voiceover counterpoint to sequences of young Sari (infected with AIDS due to a botched blood transfusion) and his stalwart mother negotiating the Iraqi medical system's trickle-down bureaucracy, its highly selective ministrations made further tenuous by the ongoing sectarian war. I can't fault Longley for bringing us closer to these individuals, but something is missing here, an intangible, non-aestheticized context that I suspect could only be provided by voluminous annotations and footnotes.  Keith Uhlich