NEWSHOUR CANVAS - At the Movies "The Mauritanian"

"‘The Mauritanian’ explores torture, abuse of former prisoner at Guantanamo Bay" PBS NewsHour 3/30/2021

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SUMMARY:  The military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, took its first 20 detainees in 2002.  Despite various calls to shutter it, it still stands almost twenty years later.  A new movie now tells the story of Mohamedou Slahi, who spent 14 years within its walls, suffering abuse, even though he was never charged.  Amna Nawaz takes a look at "The Mauritanian" for our arts and culture series, CANVAS.

FILM - "Hotel Mumbai"

"How ‘Hotel Mumbai’ illuminates the courage of the everyday hero" PBS NewsHour 4/4/2019

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SUMMARY:  In 2008, a series of terror attacks rocked Mumbai [India], ultimately killing more than 160 people over three chaotic days.  Now the horrific experience of those trapped in a hotel during the siege is being shared in “Hotel Mumbai.”  Amna Nawaz sits down with director Anthony Maras and actors Nazanin Boniadi, Dev Patel, and Armie Hammer, to discuss how the film portrays the courage of the everyday hero.

HOTEL MUMBAI Official Trailer (2019)

ON TV - "The Looming Tower"

"Pre-9/11 drama 'The Looming Tower' explores the failure of intelligence when division gets in the way" PBS NewsHour 2/23/2018

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SUMMARY:  A new drama takes viewers back to the events that led to the 9/11 attacks.  Hulu's "The Looming Tower," based on Lawrence Wright's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, retells the true story of the hunt for Osama bin Laden in the years before the fall of 2001, and how U.S. intelligence services withheld information from each other at critical junctures.  Jeffrey Brown reports.

Hulu Official Trailer

FILM - "Rosewater" the Story of an Iran Prisoner

"In ‘Rosewater,’ remembering humor and humanity after torture" PBS NewsHour 11/14/2014

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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.