‘Flight 149' Director Hopes Evidence Uncovered During Filming Will Help Hostages Win Legal Case Against UK Government & British Airways
EXCLUSIVE: The director of Sky's Flight 149: Hostage of War about one of the darkest events of the Gulf War hopes the doc will help a group of former hostages win their legal case against the UK government and British Airways.
Emmy-nominee Jenny Ash said her team uncovered evidence during the research phase that she had wanted to use in the feature doc but was dissuaded from doing so by lawyers for the hostages, who said they wanted to save it for the upcoming trial.
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Flight 149, which launches June 11, recounts one of the most extraordinary – and until recently, officially denied – chapters of the Gulf War. Just after Saddam Hussein's forces had stormed Kuwait in 1990, a British Airways flight from London to Malaysia touched down in Kuwait and the passengers and crew were held as hostages by Hussein for weeks as they became pawns in an international crisis. Hostages alleged they were subject to rape, mental abuse, mock executions and living in unsanitary conditions with little food. An image of one of the youngest hostages, Stuart Lockwood, having his hair stroked by Hussein is etched in many people's memory.
For three decades the UK government denied the public had been misled over Flight 149 until November 2021 when they finally admitted the Foreign Office were warned before the flight about the Kuwaiti invasion. The government, however, refuses to acknowledge that the flight was being used for a secret intelligence mission. Passengers and crew last year sued the government and British Airways for 'deliberately endangering them' and a recent Financial Times article revealed that British Airways denies the charges and is preparing to fight the lawsuit, with the airline's legal team describing the claims as an 'abuse of process'.
'This whole chapter of the Gulf War has been shrouded in secrecy,' Ash told Deadline. 'This is something the government denied for 30 years until they had no choice. I really hope this film will help [the hostages] win the case and bring them the justice they deserve. They deserve compensation but more than anything they just want to be told the truth and get an apology from both the government and British Airways.'
Ash's team worked closely with the hostages' lawyers and in some instances were told to hold newly-uncovered evidence back for the upcoming trial. 'There was a bit of give and take,' she added.
An unlikely inspiration
It was an unlikely figure that first got Ash thinking about Flight 149. Virgin boss Richard Branson was involved with helping a charter plane rescue some of the hostages and Ash met Branson more than three decades on while working on a branded content project.
'We were making conversation during a coffee break and I asked him what he was most proud of in his career, expecting him to talk about a rocket going into space or some such, but instead he talked about this rescue flight going into Baghdad,' Ash explained. 'I vaguely remembered Stuart Lockwood having his hair stroked by Saddam but I'd totally forgotten about that chapter of history. That got me talking to hostages about how they felt they had been gaslit for years.'
The idea percolated with Ash for some time and at one point she was developing a factual drama about the tragedy with Mr Bates vs the Post Office network ITV.
But the project was given fresh impetus following the British government's 2021 apology and it was eventually commissioned as a straight documentary feature by Sky, before premiering at the recent SXSW. 'Having that present tense narrative was really useful and made us feel it was the perfect time to tell a story of a miscarriage of justice,' she added. 'It felt like the post office [scandal]. People have been silenced and gaslit.'
Ash and her team took a three-pronged approach to Flight 149: telling the stories of the hostages, charting the 'political cat and mouse game that played out on the world stage which feels resonant today,' and covering the 'quite complicated legal case' that rumbles on as Deadline goes to press.
For the third prong, Ash, who was Emmy nominated for 2010's America: The Story of the US and has made docs on Osama bin Laden and the Nuremberg trials, wanted to imbue a sense of drama by constructing a stylized legal office and then having the lawyers – a small firm called McCue Jury & Partners that has previously taken on Vladimir Putin and Andrew Tate – interview the hostages.
She worked with Sex Education cinematographer Jamie Cairney to bring this sense of drama and help tease out experiences that were almost 'metaphysical' for the hostages. One, for example, discusses how 'the sand became a character in his head.'
'In this genre it's important to do drama in a literal way, it's got to be fragments of memory,' added Ash. 'A lot of the hostages' experiences were really nightmareish and we wanted to get inside their heads.'
On researching the 'political cat and mouse game' that was the Gulf War, Ash spent time in Kuwait 'visiting dusty garages, talking to people and finding all this footage from the Kuwaiti resistance.'
Her cause was helped by a production team including Mark Henderson, who himself was kidnapped two decades ago in South America, and Syrian producer Mowaffaq Safadi who introduced 'the Middle Eastern side of the story' and a Kuwaiti perspective.
'I didn't just want a Western perspective,' added Ash. 'People didn't realize what a deep betrayal it was when Iraq invaded Kuwait because the two were like brothers. People have traditionally seen Kuwait as this very rich people who were victims in this invasion and the truth is there was this incredible Kuwaiti resistance and amazing stories.'
Flight 149 is produced by Drum Studios in association with Sky Studios.
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