Before documentaries became “docutainment,” before an appropriate musical score, clever cinematography, and sophisticated camera work became necessary for a provocative film, there was the need to just tell a story. Margaret Loescher’s Pulled from the Rubble, which had its New York premiere at the 2005 Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, is such a film.

Here’s a film, a smoothly running family video, really, that lets simple footage, a straightforward story, and a poignant narration carry you through.

On August 19, 2004, around 4 p.m. in Baghdad, Gil Loescher and his colleagues were in a meeting with Sergio Viera de Mello, head of the United Nations in Iraq, when a truck filled with explosives barreled into the building.

Twenty people died in the horrific bombing, nearly one hundred were injured. Loescher was the only survivor from the deadliest part of the bombing. How does one move forward from such an experience? How does a family cope? And when is it time to let the past go? Pulled from the Rubble quietly explores these questions.

Margaret Loescher turns the camera on her family and her father to document his recovery and their life-changing experience—a way “to make it real; prove that [my father] is still here.” But with her telling narration, the film turns into something more. It’s a rolling river that runs a deep undercurrent of survival. It’s a telescope turned around to minimize a horrible event into a personal voyage.

Loescher, a professor at Notre Dame University in the United States for 25 years, was an expert on refugees and humanitarian efforts. Not one to be an “armchair professor,” Loescher traveled the world with his colleagues, researching and investigating the situation of refugees.

After visiting countries like Turkey and Syria the year before, Loescher traveled with a group to Iraq to investigate the human cost of the war and make recommendations to the United Nations. And being at the wrong place at the wrong time put him at point zero when the truck bomb plowed into de Mello’s office.

The recovery was slow, painful, and excruciating—both mentally and physically—for Loescher and his family. Margaret recalls to her father what they felt when they saw him in the Army hospital’s ICU in Germany—legs already amputated, right hand maimed, face scarred, glass shards stuck all through his body.

That recollection, told to Loescher months after the tragic event, tears him to his soul. But such ruminations between father and daughter become a sort of necessary evil in order to expunge the horror and work through the recovery.

“Survival is profound and it is everyday,” Margaret says in her narration. She could not utter a truer statement in summing up the family’s journey. Three weeks in the ICU in Germany, ran into four weeks in an ICU in the United Kingdom, with Loescher’s right hand being rebuilt as he embarked on painful physical therapy.

But the family holds on to each other for dear life, punctuating laughter with tears, dignity with sorrow, and normalcy with the absurd. Why was her father chosen to survive? How do you extract yourself from reliving the past? When is it acceptable to move forward? Is it all right to seek enjoyment in the little things without defiling the seriousness of the situation?

Loescher, ever the patriarchal head, guides his family as much as they support him in his recovery. He shows that it’s fine, even necessary, to seek happy times in the midst of difficulty. He takes pleasure, when he stands on his two artificial legs, that he is finally and properly taller than his daughter and wife!

In the end, Loescher is ready to let go before his daughter. They have one last conversation on how they felt seeing each other the first time after the tragedy, and then Loescher says it is time to stop reminiscing. “I took papa’s lead,” Margaret says, “and after filming the family together again, I switched the camera off.”

And it ends as abruptly as it begins. Pulled from the Rubble won’t win any awards, it won’t rock the boat in the world of documentaries, and it won’t grab international attention. It’s very simplistic in manner and technique—no music, no catchy camera shots, nothing extraordinary. But it’s documentary filmmaking at a very pure form; a story, a camera, and an unflinching personal examination.

** Dilshad D. Ali’s writing reaches across the United States to address lifestyle topics pertinent to Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Ali has covered movie premieres, film festivals, art exhibitions, concerts, and numerous other cultural stories, including the effect of September 11 on New York’s cultural landscape, for IslamOnline. Ali, a 1997 University of Maryland journalism graduate, resides in New York with her husband and two children. You can reach her at bridge@islamonline.net.

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