In 2009, London-based journalist Maziar Bahari (Gael García Bernal) was detained in Iran for more than 100 days because of an interview regarding the country’s presidential election.[6] Bahari was arrested and, while his pregnant fiancée waited for him, spent four months at Evin Prison, being brutally interrogated.
When Maziar Bahari left London in June 2009 to cover Iran’s presidential election, he assured his pregnant fiancée, Paola, that he’d be back in just a few days, a week at most. Little did he know, as he kissed her good-bye, that he would spend the next three months in Iran’s most notorious prison, enduring brutal interrogation sessions at the hands of a man he knew only by his smell: Rosewater.
For the Bahari family, wars, coups, and revolutions are not distant concepts but intimate realities they have suffered for generations: Maziar’s father was imprisoned by the shah in the 1950s, and his sister by Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1980s. Alone in his cell at Evin Prison, fearing the worst, Maziar draws strength from his memories of the courage of his father and sister in the face of torture, and hears their voices speaking to him across the years.
He dreams of being with Paola in London, and imagines all that she and his rambunctious, resilient eighty-four-year-old mother must be doing to campaign for his release. During the worst of his encounters with Rosewater, he silently repeats the names of his loved ones, calling on their strength and love to protect him and praying he will be released in time for the birth of his first child.
Rosewater is an American drama film written and directed by Jon Stewart, based on the memoir Then They Came for Me by Maziar Bahari and Aimee Molloy. Bahari’s imprisonment is connected to an interview he conducted on The Daily Show in 2009; the authorities presented the interview as evidence that he was in communication with an American spy. Due to the content of the film, Stewart has been accused by Iran’s State TV of being funded by Zionists and working with the CIA. The film is scheduled to be released in theaters on November 14, 2014.
Rosewater
Directed by: Jon Stewart
Starring: Gael García Bernal, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Golshifteh Farahani, Dimitri Leonidas, Kim Bodnia, Haluk Bilginer, Nazanin Nour
Screenplay by: Jon Stewart
Production Design by: Gerald Sullivan
Cinematography by: Bobby Bukowski
Film Editing by: Jay Rabinowitz
Costume Design by: Phaedra Dahdaleh
Set Decoration by: Karim Kheir, Nasser Zoubi
Art Direction by: Samy Keilani
Music by: Howard Shore
MPAA Rating: None.
Studio: Open Road Films
Release Date: November 14, 2014
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