Indiewire interviews Laura Poitras, director of the forthcoming documentary My Country, My Country, which airs on PBS October 25 (and opens in limited release in theaters this Friday, August 4). Today in Salon, Andrew O'Hehir calls it "a keenly constructed and tragic film, probably the best documentary so far to depict the Iraqi side of the current conflict." Here's PBS's description of the film:

Working alone in Iraq over eight months, filmmaker Laura Poitras creates an extraordinarily intimate portrait of Iraqis living under U.S. occupation. Her principal focus is Dr. Riyadh, an Iraqi medical doctor, father of six and Sunni political candidate. An outspoken critic of the occupation, he is equally passionate about the need to establish democracy in Iraq, arguing that Sunni participation in the January 2005 elections is essential. Yet all around him, Dr. Riyadh sees only chaos, as his waiting room fills each day with patients suffering the physical and mental effects of ever-increasing violence.

How/where did the initial ideas for "My Country, My Country" come from?

[Poitras:] In November 2003 I read an article by George Packer in the New Yorker ("War After the War" [link to the piece]), about the first months of the U.S. occupation in Iraq. It was one of those very long New Yorker article that take days to read. By the time I finished it, I knew I was making a documentary in Iraq. I was motivated by a sense of despair about the war, and a desire to reveal what was happening in Iraq through the stories of people on the ground. Continued.