description:
Queen of the Mountain
A Documentary Film
Contact: Martha Goell
Telephone 610 642-9112
Email: Mlubell@aol.com
PIONEERING WOMAN ARCHAEOLOGIST
Philly Fun Guide Announces Premiere with Open Captioning
Bryn Mawr Film Institute, Wednesday, March 22, 7:00 P.M.
Theresa Goell embarked on her career as an archaeologist with four strikes against her: She was a woman, divorced, extremely hard of hearing and a Jew working with Muslims. But all that didn't deter her.
Born in 1901, she could have had a comfortable life as the wife of a lawyer and the sister-in-law of a prominent rabbi in Brooklyn, but she left her husband and son for a lifelong adventure that led her to a desolate mountain in Southeast Turkey.
Martha Goell Lubell, who has lived in Wynnewood for the last 28 years, chronicled the life of her aunt Theresa, a pioneer female archaeologist, in a new documentary, Queen of the Mountain, filmed mostly on location in Turkey. Since Goell was hard-of-hearing, the film will be screened with open captioning to make the film accessible to hard-of-hearing and deaf viewers.
Acclaimed actress Tovah Feldshuh, who recently starred in Golda’s Balcony on Broadway, is the voice of Theresa Goell. In addition to Lubell, who produced and directed the film, others from the Philadelphia area who had a role in the film were Sharon Mullally, the editor and writer; Carol Rosenbaum, who did additional writing; John Anthony, the sound designer; Kevin Diehl, the graphic designer, and Sumi Tonooka, who wrote the music.
Lubell says, “I started hearing stories about my aunt’s exploits when I was a little girl growing up in New York.” The idea of putting the saga on film occurred to her while she was making her last film, Daring to Resist, which she produced with Bala Cynwyd filmmaker Barbara Attie.
After Theresa Goell’s brother died in the late 1990s, Lubell’s cousins found boxes full of photos, letters, audio tapes and film relating to Theresa’s unusual career as well as her personal struggles: Theresa was nearly deaf, divorced, pursuing a career in what was then a man’s field and a Jewish woman working in a Muslim country. “There was a film in those boxes,” says Lubell. “And I decided to make a film about my aunt, knowing it would take me to those places that I had heard about from her decades before.”
Theresa excavated the spectacular burial site of King Antiochus on Nemrud Dagh, a 7,000-foot-high mountain three days’ walk from the nearest post office. Antiochus ruled the kingdom of Commagene, and controlled the trade routes across the Euphrates River in the century before the birth of Christ.Theresa first leaned of the site when she wrote a paper in graduate school in 1938.
“Finding the tomb of Antiochus at Nemrud Dagh was always something Theresa wanted to do,” reports Donald Sanders, editor of a book on her work at Nemrud Dagh. “We know Antiochus was a very wealthy person. He would have had very elaborate materials buried with him. The contents of the tomb could have rivaled that of King Tut.”
Theresa was determined to get to Nemrud Dagh and it took her six years to get permission to excavate, raise money for her excavations, find scholars to collaborate with her and equip a mountaintop camp for 50 people. In 1953, at age 50, she finally got there and kept working there over the next twenty years.
Theresa was to work very closely with the Kurdish villagers who became the backbone of her excavations and were almost like her family. “They treat me like a mother,” Goell remarks in her oral history, “ And they’re very kind to me.”
“She was thinking on all different levels,” according to Martha Sharp Joukowsky, a professor of archaeology at Brown University who is featured in the film. “Not only of what had to be done in the archaeological sense but also in the human sense, of the people who worked for her and were so devoted to her.” She brought clothing and medicine from New York and treated the medical problems of her workers and their families, and taught their wives hygiene and birth control. Her nephew, Jon Goell, relates: “She was considered queen of the mountain.”
Goell never found the tomb but Nemrud Dagh has become a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the most famous archaeological destinations in Turkey.
- admission free for students -
Additional options for viewing the film:
Scheduled to be broadcast on local public television stations WHYY, Thursday, March 23, 10:00 P.M. and WNET in New York on Sunday, March 26, 2:00 P.M.
Copies also available for sale through Women Making Movies - check out their press kit in pdf.
