Letters from Baghdad

This vividly insightful quasi-documentary spy thriller tells the timely, true story of intrepid explorer Gertrude Bell (1868-1926), who influenced Middle Eastern history in the early 1900s. More influential than her colleague T.E. Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia), adventurous Bell helped map part of the Arabian Peninsula after WWI. She established the Iraq Museum, which housed Mesopotamian artifacts and antiquities (it was ransacked during the American invasion of Baghdad in 2003). Assembled from period photographs, archival footage, and fake “talking-head” interviews, filmmakers Sabine Krayenbühl and Zeva Oelbaum’s Letters from Baghdad chronicles the extraordinary life of Bell, daughter of a British baronet, who became the first woman to receive highest honors in Modern History at Oxford University. Superbly narrated by Tilda Swinton from Bell’s own copious correspondence, the film follows her solo journey, commanding a 17-camel caravan across the uncharted Arabian Desert for 1,500 miles as the first female freelance archaeologist, along the way befriending Bedouins, sheikhs, and other tribesmen while learning the local dialects, history, and customs. Because of her deep knowledge of the Hashemite dynasties and fluency in Arabic, Persian, French, German, and English, she was the only woman given diplomatic status at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. That led to Winston Churchill’s invitation to the 1921 Cairo Conference, where Syria’s Faisal was her choice to become king of the newly formed country of Iraq, which attempted to encompass Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. “Oil is the trouble, of course,” Bell noted. “Detestable stuff.” If Bell’s exotic saga sounds familiar, it may be because of Werner Herzog’s disappointing Queen of the Desert (2015), starring Nicole Kidman as Bell. Recommended. (S. Granger)