A documentary by Sabine KrayenbühlandZeva Oelbaum
With Tilda Swinton as the Voice of Gertrude Bell
Executive Producers: Tilda Swinton,Thelma Schoonmaker, Ruedi Gerber
Letters From Baghdad
Spy, Explorer, Powerhouse
Gertrude Bell was as controversial as the history she made
“More than anyone else, she [Gertrude Bell] is credited with creating modern Iraq — drawing its borders, choosing its king — after the upheavals of World War I”.
–byTim Arango, Baghdad Bureau Chief
The New York Times, June 26, 2014
Opening Theatrically in New York at Lincoln Plaza and the Angelika Film Center June 2, 2017
Winner – Audience Award – Beirut International Film Festival
Official Selection – IDFA, DocNYC, BFI London Film Festival, HAIFA Film Festival
Voiced and executive produced by Academy Award winning actor Tilda Swinton, Letters from Baghdad tells the extraordinary and dramatic story of British spy, explorer and political powerhouse Gertrude Bell, who was the most powerful woman in the British Empire in her day. Bell traveled widely in Arabia before being recruited by British military intelligence to help draw the borders of Iraq after WWI, establish the modern state of Iraq and reshape the modern Middle East in ways that still reverberate today. Among her accomplishments, she created the Iraq Museum to preserve the priceless cultural artifacts and antiquities of the region. This was the museum that was infamously ransacked during the American invasion in 2003. Many of the ancient sites that Gertrude Bell visited and photographed, such as Palmyra, Nineveh and Nimrud, have been destroyed by ISIL. She left over 7000 photographs, including stunning panoramas of these sites. Nicole Kidman portrays Gertrude Bell in Werner Herzog’s upcoming film Queen of the Desert.
Using stunning, never-seen-before footage of the region from 100 years ago, and more than 1600 letters written by Bell and her contemporaries, the film chronicles Bell’s extraordinary journey into both the uncharted Arabian desert and the inner sanctum of British male colonial power.
More influential than her friend and colleague T.E. Lawrence (a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia), why has she been written out of the history she helped make?
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Falco Ink.
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