Writer’s intention
I am Scottish, living in Berlin, but have also travelled extensively in the Middle East and Central Asia, and studied and taught for substantial periods of time in West Africa and India. These experiences are not wholly different from that of my father and his forefathers. But with one distinction. I undertook my travels as a student, writer or teacher, the first in many generations of my family not armed and uniformed and obliged to murder in the forced ‘adventure’ of British colonialism. While I felt an early repugnance to this history, my imagination was nonetheless stimulated towards horizons very far distant from a home in working class Glasgow. I am not proud of this legacy. Yet I do want to deal with that subject.
In my experience as writer and script editor, I have often had to deal with strong, active female characters. Gertrude Bell was (as she described herself) such ‘A Person’.
And finally, crucially, we touch on the subject of Iraq. BELL will be a feature film, not a history lesson. First and foremost, it is the story of a restless, enterprising woman. But I hope, too, it will ease a viewing public in to some understanding of the successes, failures and fault lines of the early creation of this sometimes perplexing, modern nation-state, Iraq.
Director’s intention
I was born in Baghdad in the 1950s and it seemed that the conversations between the adults were always affected in some way by the British colonial past and its influence on the history of Iraq. When I was a boy, I witnessed the 1958 coup against the Iraqi king and his British backers very closely. Despite the anti-colonial attitude my family had, one figure of the British colonial administration in Iraq was always spoken of positively: Gertrude Bell.
Gertrude Bell has an accumulation of very interesting and dramatic character components. Not only does she have to make her way in a secret service organization dominated by men, but she also has to complete a colonial mission as a European woman in the midst of a misogynistic Arab society.
I think that Gertrude Bell is an excellent character that allows me to show the relationship between the Orient and the Occident in a completely different way. I am an Arab filmmaker, who lives and works in the west, but I am very closely tied to the Arab world, especially Iraq due to my heritage, and it is my desire to build this bridge.