• James Andelin (1917-2006) - Actor who appeared in Field of Dreams, City That Never Sleeps, The Babe and Grumpier Old Men. He died of congestive heart failure and emphysema December 27, in Chicago.
• John Bishop (1929-2006) - Playwright and screenwriter who wrote The Package and Drop Zone and did rewrites for Paramount during the '90s. He died of cancer December 20, in Bad Heilbrunn, Germany.
• João de Barro, aka Braguinha (1907-2006) - Brazilian composer, writer and director. He made the films Alô, Alô, Brasil and Anastácio, acted in Garota de Ipanema and wrote music for The Mandarin. He died from an infection December 24, in Rio de Janeiro.
• Pierre Delanoë (1918-2006) - French songwriter who wrote music for The Story of O and The Country I Came From. He died of heart failure December 26.
• Marion Doran (c.1910-2006) - Vet of Paramount and Columbia Pictures who started as a script typer for Preston Sturges and later married film executive D.A. Doran. She died December 26, in Woodland Hills, California.
• Wilma Dykeman (1920-2006) - Writer on the environment and race who narrated the documentary The Electric Valley. She died from an infection resulting from a broken hip December 22, in Asheville, North Carolina.

In spite of having a team of critics watching and reviewing films at Sundance, Iraq in Fragments, which ended up sweeping the Sundance documentary competition, slipped through the Cinematical cracks. When I saw the film was screening last week in Seattle as part of the Seattle Arab and Iranian Film Festival, I immediately made plans to catch it. I knew very little about the film in advance, but given the popularity of political documentaries at film festivals, I suppose I was expecting Iraq in Fragments to be a film about how the United States is destroying Iraq.  What I saw instead was a beautifully shot portrait of the human side of Iraq -- the differences that divide Iraq's Shia, Sunni and Kurdish population, and the similarities that, as is so often the case in cultures around the world, get overlooked in the need to identify with a group. For there to be an "us", it seems, there must be a "them", and in the Iraq of the moment, that need to define by differences seems to be prevalent.

Director James Longley first went to Iraq before the U.S. invasion, but found it impossible at that time to get permission to film. He returned in 2003 and spent the next two years living and filming in Iraq, gathering the stories that would ultimately become the pieces of Iraq in Fragments. Longley, in his director's notes for the film, insists that he wasn't looking to make a political film or a war documentary, but a film about the people living in Iraq. He filmed six stories, three of which became the framework for the the film, one each from the Sunni, Shia and Kurdish populations of Iraq -- groups that, with the fall of Sadaam Hussein and the demise of the Baathist regime, are struggling for power and autonomy within their country even as the United States struggles to maintain its own control.