© National Film and Television School and Beguiled Eye Productions 2004

www.pulledfromtherubble.com A FILM BY MARGARET LOESCHER

BEGUILED EYE PRODUCTIONS & NATIONAL FILM AND TELEVISION SCHOOL present

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“An exceptional privilege to watch...” – Anthony Barnett, openDemocracy

“To examine and to contemplate on a personal tragedy, and its aftermath, unflinchingly, but with love and artistry; how better to make a documentary film?” – Dennis O’Rourke, CameraWork Pty Ltd

BEGUILED EYE PRODUCTIONS

Worsted Cottage, 13 Lowes YardSt. George’s Street, NorwichNR3 1AW, UKTEL +44 (0)1603 633 183CELL +44 (0)7815 096330info@pulledfromtherubble.com www.beguiledeye.com

“an intimate, inspiring portrait of courage and resilience” – The New York Times

Synopsis

In August 2003, Gil Loescher went to Baghdad on a humanitarian research trip. He and his colleague were in a meeting with the head of the United Nations in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, when a truck full of explosives was driven into the side of the building. Gil was the only survivor from the most devastated section of the building. All the other people with him in the meeting died.

Through poignantly honest narration, and observational scenes of high emotion, his daughter records the family’s recovery during the months after the bomb. Using the camera becomes her way of dealing with the suddenness of the family’s changed reality, and a way of re-visiting the haunting images of the bomb site – a place of both horror and hope.

CreditsWRITER, DIRECTOR AND PRODUCER

Margaret Loescher

CO-PRODUCER

Daniel J. Chalfen

EDITOR

Barbara Zosel

CINEMATOGRAPHERS

Margaret Loescher and Annemarie Lean-Vercoe

ON-LINE EDITOR

Ben Putland

SOUND MIXER

Mark Underwood

ASSEMBLY EDITOR

Peter Lambert

ADDITIONAL FOOTAGE

Ann Loescher, Claire Loescher, Salim Lone, Khaled Mansour,Timothy Sopp

PUBLICITY DESIGNER

Emma Arnold

© TIMOTHY SOPP

2004 64 minutes 4:3 letterboxed Colour Stereo

available in PAL and NTSC Digibeta, Betacam, DVD, Mini DV, DV cam and VHS

Past and Upcoming Screenings University tour, USA, 2005Columbia University, 25th OctoberSeton Hall University, 26th OctoberConnecticut College, 27th OctoberUniversity of North Carolina, 1st NovemberUniversity of North Carolina at Asheville, 2nd NovemberEmory University, 3rd NovemberUniversity of Notre Dame, 11th and 13th NovemberSaint Mary’s College, 15th November

Amnesty International Film Festival, Salt Lake City, 20056th November

WWW.AMNESTYUSA.ORG/FILMFEST/

‘The Way We Live’, Munich, 20053rd, 6pm November

WWW.ABM-FESTIVAL.DE/FEST05.HTM

Tricycle Theatre, London, 20054th SeptemberCharity screening for Handicap International

UNHCR headquarters, Geneva, 200519th AugustScreening to mark the 2nd anniversary of the bombingof the UN in Iraq.

Human Rights Watch Film Festival, New York City, 200520th June21st June22nd June

WWW.HRW.ORG/IFF/2005/NY/

Silver Docs, Washington DC, 2005USA PREMIERE and in Competition15th June16th June

WWW.SILVERDOCS.COM/2005

European Commission for Refugees and Exile, 2005 General Meeting20th May

Private screening at conference in Hungary

‘Pulled from the Rubble’ is currently available for university, conference, school and hospital screenings. To book a screening please email info@pulledfromtherubble.com

Past and Upcoming Screenings(continued)

Documenta Madrid, 20056th and 8th May

Full-length Documentary Competition

WWW. DOCUMENTAMADRID.COM

Frontline Club, London18th April, 2005

Public screening at war journalists’ club

WWW.FRONTLINECLUB.COM

7th Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival, 20057th and 8th April, 2005

WWW.FILMFESTIVAL.GR/FILM_FESTIVAL/UK/

Its All True, Sao Paulo, 20051st and 8th April

WWW. ITSALLTRUE.COM.BR/2005/

Human Rights Watch Film Festival, London, 2005CLOSING NIGHT FILM

23rd and 24th March

WWW.HRW.ORG/IFF/LONDON/2005

National Film Theatre23rd February, 2005

National Film and Television School showcase

WWW.NFTSFILM-TV.AC.UK

British Library, Human Rights Day, 200410th December Introduced by Mary Robinson, former Head of State for Ireland and former High Commissioner for Human Rights. Hosted by openDemocracy and funded by

the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation.

WWW.OPENDEMOCRACY.NET

War Crimes Tribunal, the Hague26th November, 2004

IDFA (International Documentary Festival Amsterdam), 2004WORLD PREMIERE20th, 23rd and 25th November

First Appearance Competition

WWW.IDFA.NL/IPROG_HOME_EN.ASP

© MARGARET LOESCHER

RADIO

National Public Radio, Talk of the Nation

Live interview with Margaret Loescher, 16th June, 2005

BBC Radio Norfolk, The Breakfast Programme

Live interview with Margaret Loescher, 22nd March, 2005

BBC Religious NetworkLive interviews with Margart Loescher for local stations across England, 20th

March, 2005

BBC Radio 4, The Film ProgrammeMargaret Loescher interviewed with Bruni Burres (director of Human Rights

Watch Film Festival), 12th March, 2005

BBC World Service, The Outlook ProgrammeInterview with Margaret Loescher and Gil Loescher, December, 2005

TELEVISION

SBS Broadcast TV, The Netherlands

Interview with Margaret Loescher, November, 2004

PAPER

‘When Large Events Are Writ Small, but Deep’, The New YorkTimes, 9th June, 2005

‘Finding the Balance’, The International Voice of IDFA, 23rd November , 2004

Pulled from the Rubble has also been mentioned in :

Time Out, London

Vertigo

The Oxford Times

Press for Pulled from the Rubble

Director’s Biography/FilmographyDirector: Margaret Loescher

Born and brought up in South Bend, Indiana, Margaret and her family moved to England during her school years. Margaret was trained as an Anthropologist and received her BA degree from Cambridge University. She then went on to complete a Masters at the Granada Centre for Vi-sual Anthropology, Manchester University. Since then, she has trained on the Advanced Programme at the National Film and Television School, U.K. and has been making films independently in New York City, London and, most recently, Norwich. Pulled from the Rubble is her first feature documentary.

Television credits include, directing an ABC Nightline 15 minute news piece about the bombing of the United Nations in Baghdad . This aired in late August, marking the anniversary of the bomb, and has recently been nominated for an Emmy Award. Margaret is currently directing three short documentaries for the series ‘3 Minute Wonders’for Channel 4.

Independent films include, Piece of Me, a documentary about the novelist Zadie Smith, that premiered at the Corner House Cinema, Manchester and screened in New York City; A Camera at the Addy, a short documentary about an inner city playground. Margaret has also been director of pho-tography, camera-person, sound recordist and researcher on a number of documentary projects. She also teaches camera workshops .

Margaret has her own company, Beguiled Eye Productions . She is currently working in collaboration with Fulcrum TV on her second feature documen-tary about Burmese refugees in Thailand. Margaret hopes to continue touring with Pulled from the Rubble , taking it to University, hospital and conferences audiences once she has finished the festival tour.

© JOEL CHALFEN

Co-producer’s Biography/FilmographyCo-producer: Daniel J. Chalfen

Daniel J. Chalfen’s recent producing credits include the highly acclaimed “39 Pounds of Love” (in association with HBO/Cinemax Documentary Films; “Pulled from the Rubble” (Co-Producer); the ground-breaking six-episode Israeli-Palestinian documentary series “Ordinary People” (screened in festivals and broadcast worldwide); and the award-winning short film “The Mail Gaze” (showcased at the Cannes Film Festival). His earlier documentary credits include “Paths” (co-producer and writer); “Cultural Safari”(Executive Producer), and “Dance the Wild Side” (Pro-duction Manager). He has worked in positions including Producer, Line Producer, Location Producer and Production Manager on travel series, behind-the-scenes shows, and news and current affairs programs and has consulted on films as diverse as “A Shadowed Gaze,” Willy Holt’s Holocaust story; “Gosa-Voyage,” following the immigration of Ethiopian Jews to Israel; and “Talekeepers,” an animatedfeature film.

Originally f rom London, England, Chalfen has lived in Jerusalem and Los Angeles and is currently based in New York. His company, raDiCal media ltd., was founded with a vision of giving voices to the unheard and images to the unseen. raDiCal media produces and consults for provocative, compelling, socially conscious, and visually powerful films. Chalfen is currently in-production on the feature documentary “Dear Mr. President”, following six Israeli and Palestinian teenage girls taking a road trip across the USA, and is developing a television series about astonishing, unexpected cultural and social phenomenon in countries in the Middle East.

Chalfen worked as a Journalist before moving into the world of filmmak-ing. He is a graduate of UCLA’s School of Cinema, Television, and Theater, Los Angeles, (Professional Certificate in Producing); the Hebrew Univer-sity of Jerusalem, Israel (MA in Israeli Politics and Society); and the Uni-versity of Leeds, England (BA Hons) Politics and Religious Studies). He is a Member of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA).

Director’s Statement: Why I made Pulled from the Rubble

In August 2003, I was on the Advanced Programme at the National Film and Television School. I had enrolled at the school to make a documentary film about the American poet, and a relative of mine, William Carlos Williams. I had written a script, gathered a crew of three, and had bought airline tickets for early September.

I was also busy helping my family move house. There was a heat wave and the physical labour was unbearable. We were trying to get the move complete before Papa left for a research trip to Baghdad, Iraq, on the 17th of August.

Then, on the afternoon of the 19th of August, a neighbour ran into our garden. She had been watching the news and had heard that the United Nations head-quarters in Baghdad had been devas-tated by a truck bomb. We knew that Papa and his colleague were due to be visiting the head of the UN in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, but we did not yet know whether he was in the building at the time of the explosion.

20 hours later, when my family and I first heard about the extent of Papa’s injuries, our whole lives became focused on his recovery. In the first few weeks his survival was not at all a sure thing. We entered into a world which was marked moment by moment by each of his slow, methodical breathes. Nothing outside of this world was relevant.

Once Papa left intensive care and was allowed to wake, we began to look forward to his return home and to consider the ways in which he might be able to walk again. But we also began to search for the details of the event. Papa was particularly interested in learning how he was saved and pulled from the rubble alive. He remembered snippets of his rescue through a morphine induced haze, but he wanted to learn more.

This quest for knowledge of the rescue was what encouraged me to pick up my camera again. Everyday I witnessed Papa trying hard to get on with his life, acknowledging what had happened but being active in spite of it, and I wanted to do the same. I went to Geneva and to New York to interview people at the UN about the bomb. The aim was to collect information about the bomb that I could return home to show to my fam-ily and from which I could make a film to show to a wider audience.

Between trips I filmed my family at home sometimes talking about the bomb, but mostly re-adapting everyday living to Papa’s injuries. What struck us all, and the people around us, was Papa’s energy and enthusiasm for life. He mourned his colleagues deeply and felt that he was incredibly lucky to be alive. It was partly through amazement at his positive atti-tude and at his remarkable recovery that

© MARGARET LOESCHER

I wanted to keep recording. I was never sure whether the video record I was keeping at home was for myself or for a wider public. Sometimes I filmed as a means of distancing myself from upsetting moments. Sometimes I filmed so that those moments would never be forgotten.

Some months, and hours and hours of video later, I started the editing process. During the assembly edit I was very confused about the film I was making. In trying to edit the interviews of UN staff, something didn’t feel right. I slowly realised I was trying to tell somebody else’s story and what I needed to do was tell my own. After this realisation, I suddenly became interested in showing our experiences as a family, and why I felt I needed to film and keep a record.

This became the film. It was a very difficult film to make, even when the narrative was at last found. It is also a difficult film for me and my family to show, but it needs to be shown. When we open the newspaper or turn on the television and see the latest report of an explosion, killing and injuring tens and hundreds of people, most of us are overwhelmed. How can we possibly take on board that horror? We read of the numbers of dead and the numbers of injured, and we may easily lose sight of or feeling for the individual. But individual stories are what makes us human. They are what makes us feel for each other. I can only hope that through making and showing, Pulled from the Rubble, I have made a small contribution towards a more peaceful world.

© MARGARET LOESCHER