Actualités

There’s a reason some stories take decades to tell properly. Jenny Ash’s documentary “Flight 149: Hostage of War” excavates one of those buried historical moments that sounds too nightmarish to be real.

On August 2, 1990, British Airways Flight 149 made what should have been a routine refueling stop in Kuwait City. Instead, nearly 400 passengers and crew found themselves trapped in the opening hours of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, becoming unwitting human shields in what would escalate into the Gulf War.

The central question haunting this film—and its survivors—is deceptively simple: why was this commercial flight allowed to land in a war zone? For four months, these ordinary travelers endured extraordinary horrors while their governments offered shifting explanations and bureaucratic double-speak.

Ash’s film operates as both investigative journalism and human testimony, peeling back layers of official secrecy to reveal a story that feels like a political...