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Season's Greetings and Best Wishes from

the
Letters from Baghdad team
as we look ahead into the New Year!
"How big the world is. How big and how
wonderful..."
Gertrude Bell, Tehran, Persia 1892

Forward

Gertrude Bell first

traveled to the
Middle East when
she visited her
uncle, Frank
Lascelles, British
ambassador to
Tehran, in 1892.
She would remain
capitivated by it for
the rest of her life.
While in Tehran, the
23-year Oxford
graduate mastered
the Persian
language, Farsi,
and began a prolific
writing career as she sought to share the wonders of the East
with a broader audience. In 1897, she published The Poems from
the Divan of Hafiz - which is considered by many to be the finest
English translation of the work of the revered Persian poet, Hafiz.

Project update...

We have spent the

last several months
pulling together all
elements of the film
leading to our final
edit: scanning
footage, recording
narration,
composing the
score, mixing sound,
retouching color and
animation
design. Scouring
the world's archives
for the finest quality
vintage footage led
us to the 39
underground vaults of The Library of Congress's National AudioVideo Conservation Center where we manually scrolled through
reels of nitrate encrusted footage from the 1910s and 1920s.

Update from our partners & advisors...

A new exhibit at The
Institute for the Study
of the Ancient World
(ISAW) - The Eye of
the Shah: Qajar Court
Photography and the
Persian Past shows
how photographers many of them engaged
by the longest reigning
Shah of the Qajar
Dynasty (1785-1925) - ultimately created a portrait of Iran's
ancient and recent past.

It's not too late to join the LFB team...

We continue to raise funds for post-production and distribution
costs. You can donate to the film on our website, and please
spread the word about Letters from Baghdad through
Facebook and Twitter. Thank you so much!

About the film...

Directed by Sabine Krayenbhl and Zeva Oelbaum, Letters
From Baghdad tells the story of Gertrude Bell who left the
confines of Edwardian England to seek freedom and
independence in the Arabian desert and became the most
powerful woman of her day in the British Empire. In the aftermath
of WWI, Bell helped draw the borders of modern Iraq, was
instrumental in installing its first king and founded the Iraq
Museum that was infamously ransacked in 2003. The first
feature-length documentary on Gertrude Bell, the film will explore
the choices that trail blazing women make, and how decisions
made by Bell and her colleagues continue to influence current
events in the Middle East and the world today.
Be sure to join us on: Facebook | Twitter | Official Website |
LFB Trailer

At top: Qasr-e Shirin, Iran 1911, Photograph by Gertrude Bell, courtesy of

the Gertrude Bell Archives, Newcastle University
At middle: The Library of Congress's National Audio-Video Conservation
Center in Culpeper Virginia

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