Film Release: "Letters from Baghdad" Opens Across the U.S.
Letters From Baghdad
More influential than her friend and colleague T.E. Lawrence (a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia), why she (Gertrude Bell) has been written out of the history she helped make?
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 since been destroyed by ISIL. She left over 7000 photographs, including stunning panoramas of these sites.
Using stunning, never-seen-before footage of the region from 100 years ago, rare documents from the Iraq National Library and Archive 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. All dialogue in the film is excerpted from original source material.
Letters From Baghdad: The True Story of Gertrude Bell and Iraq
NOW PLAYING IN SELECT CITIES NATIONWIDE
Visit LettersFromBaghdad.com for a theater near you.
A documentary by Sabine Krayenbühl and Zeva Oelbaum With Tilda Swinton as the Voice of Gertrude Bell Executive Producers: Tilda Swinton, Thelma Schoonmaker, Ruedi Gerbe.
Complied by Arab America