{"id":154587,"date":"2025-06-03T10:40:09","date_gmt":"2025-06-03T10:40:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/154587\/"},"modified":"2025-06-03T10:40:09","modified_gmt":"2025-06-03T10:40:09","slug":"flight-149-director-on-sky-doc-hostages-legal-case-richard-branson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/154587\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Flight 149’ Director On Sky Doc, Hostages Legal Case & Richard Branson"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tEXCLUSIVE: <\/strong>The director of Sky<\/a>\u2019s Flight 149<\/a>: 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<\/a> and British Airways<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\tEmmy-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. <\/p>\n

\n\tFlight 149, which launches June 11, recounts one of the most extraordinary \u2013 and until recently, officially denied \u2013 chapters of the Gulf War.\u00a0Just after Saddam Hussein\u2019s 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\u2019s memory.<\/p>\n

\n\tFor 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 \u201cdeliberately endangering them\u201d and a recent Financial Times article revealed that British Airways denies the charges and is preparing to fight the lawsuit, with the airline\u2019s legal team describing the claims as an \u201cabuse of process\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThis whole chapter of the Gulf War has been shrouded in secrecy,\u201d Ash told Deadline. \u201cThis 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAsh\u2019s team worked closely with the hostages\u2019 lawyers and in some instances were told to hold newly-uncovered evidence back for the upcoming trial. \u201cThere was a bit of give and take,\u201d she added. <\/p>\n

\n\tAn unlikely inspiration<\/strong><\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tRichard Branson<\/a>. Image: Roberto Finizio\/Getty<\/p>\n

\n\tIt 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.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe 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,\u201d Ash explained. \u201cI vaguely remembered Stuart Lockwood having his hair stroked by Saddam but I\u2019d totally forgotten about that chapter of history. That got me talking to hostages about how they felt they had been gaslit for years.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe 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. <\/p>\n

\n\tBut the project was given fresh impetus following the British government\u2019s 2021 apology and it was eventually commissioned as a straight documentary feature by Sky, before premiering at the recent SXSW. \u201cHaving 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,\u201d she added. \u201cIt felt like the post office [scandal]. People have been silenced and gaslit.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAsh and her team took a three-pronged approach to Flight 149: telling the stories of the hostages, charting the \u201cpolitical cat and mouse game that played out on the world stage which feels resonant today,\u201d and covering the \u201cquite complicated legal case\u201d that rumbles on as Deadline goes to press. <\/p>\n

\n\tFor the third prong, Ash, who was Emmy nominated for 2010\u2019s 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 \u2013 a small firm called McCue Jury & Partners\u00a0that has previously taken on Vladimir Putin and Andrew Tate \u2013 interview the hostages. <\/p>\n

\n\tShe worked with Sex Education cinematographer Jamie Cairney to bring this sense of drama and help tease out experiences that were almost \u201cmetaphysical\u201d for the hostages. One, for example, discusses how \u201cthe sand became a character in his head.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIn this genre it\u2019s important to do drama in a literal way, it\u2019s got to be fragments of memory,\u201d added Ash. \u201cA lot of the hostages\u2019 experiences were really nightmareish and we wanted to get inside their heads.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tOn researching the \u201cpolitical cat and mouse game\u201d that was the Gulf War, Ash spent time in Kuwait \u201cvisiting dusty garages, talking to people and finding all this footage from the Kuwaiti resistance.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHer 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 \u201cthe Middle Eastern side of the story\u201d and a Kuwaiti perspective.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI didn\u2019t just want a Western perspective,\u201d added Ash. \u201cPeople didn\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFlight 149 is produced by Drum Studios<\/a> in association with Sky Studios<\/a>. <\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"EXCLUSIVE: The director of Sky\u2019s Flight 149: Hostage of War about one of the darkest events of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":154588,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[3087,65732,77,65733,65734,3943,48320,197,65735,16,10788,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-154587","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-british-airways","9":"tag-drum-studios","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-flight-149","12":"tag-flight-149-hostage-of-war","13":"tag-movies","14":"tag-richard-branson","15":"tag-sky","16":"tag-sky-studios","17":"tag-uk","18":"tag-uk-government","19":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114619011832428590","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154587"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154587\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/154588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}