Andrew Berends’s somber documentary, opening today at Cinema Village, is part of a second wave of Iraq films cresting this summer. These purport to give new perspectives on the wartime experience as it deepens with America’s extended involvement.

Deborah Scranton’s “The War Tapes” attempted to offer an unfiltered view of military experience by putting the cameras in the hands of three soldiers, eliciting sometimes unnerving expressions of fear, sadness, and cynicism. The upcoming “My Country, My Country,” meanwhile, introduces the Iraqi perspective through its loose chronicle of the hope-filled run-up to the country’s first free elections.

Combining aspects of both those films, “The Blood of My Brother” follows the emotional struggles of a distraught Iraqi family whose eldest son was accidentally killed by American soldiers. Mr. Berends’s sensitivity and clear lack of any [ax??] lets the story be experienced for what it is: Not a veiled argument against American military tactics or for immediate troop withdrawal, but a wrenching account of individual tragedy in a politically and physically treacherous world.

Ra’ad (who, like the rest of family, we only know by first name) died one night while on volunteer patrol at the Khadimiya mosque in Baghdad, caught in an American barrage intended for a suspected suicide bomber. His brother, Ibrahim, becomes the family’s new breadwinner, and this slight-looking teen provides the documentary’s emotional focus.

Ibrahim comforts the devastated household, prying his wailing mother off her son’s grave. But he also must fight back his own numbing grief and vengeful urges. The latter are notably not hardened into calls for war but agonized over as personal weakness. Mr. Berends also avoids charges of sympathy-mongering or vilification by featuring American soldiers, who voice their own fears, regrets, and need for self-defense. The film’s title comes to assume a certain Christian poignancy.

“The Blood of My Brother” also shows the varied political backdrop to Ibrahim’s struggles. Radical cleric Moktada al-Sadr fulminates to crowds, and Mr. Berends catches terrifying glimpses of urban skirmishes live. Like the rest of the movie, these sequences appear without much introduction, which is particularly confusing here because they do not feature Ibrahim. But they expose the viewer to the bewilderment of being in the middle of things, beset by both bullets and speeches. And it’s not easy to forget the sight of a freshly evacuated street, strewn with abandoned slippers and two dying men.

Movies about Iraq are often criticized for not giving the big picture. The words of one victim briefly visited here may explain the compromise by expressing the consuming sadness and solitude of personal loss: “There is nothing like our catastrophe.”