Excerpt
ACTOR: You must not just take his blood. You must take his hope
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): In 2009, Maziar Bahari was held for 118 days in solitary confinement in a Tehran prison, a very real ordeal dramatized in the new film “Rosewater.” (trailer link)
Bahari was a Canadian citizen who’d returned to his native Iran as a journalist working for Western media organizations, his assignment, to cover a momentous election that would end in mass demonstrations and mass arrests, after reformer Mir Hossein Mousavi’s challenge to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ended in a defeat widely condemned and discredited as fraudulent.
The film shows how Bahari, played by actor Gael Garcia Bernal, met and interviewed protagonists on both sides, before being arrested and charged as a spy. He then endures interrogation by a man known only as Rosewater.
One bit of absurdist evidence, an actual appearance in a Tehran cafe that Bahari had made on the Comedy Central program “The Daily Show.”
MAN: What do I have in common with you?
MAN: Who is the number one enemy of the United States?
MAN: Al-Qaida.
MAN: Al-Qaida is also the number one enemy of Iran.
JON STEWART, “Rosewater”: And then you are going to back up and just go out of frame that way.
JEFFREY BROWN: That connection and the courage and even humor shown by Bahari even in the face of torture drew the real-life host of “The Daily Show,” Jon Stewart, to the story, and to his first foray into directing a feature film.
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