Iran Colloquium: An Iranian Odyssey: Maziar Bahari and the Iranian Regime

Event time: 
Friday, October 28, 2016 - 12:00pm to 1:30pm
Location: 
Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS), A001 See map
77 Prospect St.
New Haven, CT 06511
(Location is wheelchair accessible)
Event description: 

On June 21, 2009, just nine days after Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected in a highly contentious election, the Revolutionary Guards arrested award-winning Canadian-Iranian journalist and filmmaker, Maziar Bahari, in his mother’s home in Tehran. For the next 118 days, he remained imprisoned in Iran’s notorious Evin prison, where he was severely beaten, and accused, among other things, of espionage and plotting a velvet revolution. Rosewater is a riveting, on-the-streets account of the contentious elections, and the tale of a reporter willing to risk everything to tell a story. But it is also a deeply moving personal story about a family profoundly — and brutally — impacted by Iran’s changing regimes. In 1954, Maziar’s father, a Communist, was imprisoned by the Shah’s secret police and spent two years in prison for the crime of belonging to a treasonous organization. Nearly 30 years later, not long after the Shah’s government was overthrown and the Islamic Republic of Iran was created, Maziar’s sister, Maryam, spent six years in prison for her involvement with the Communist party. Bahari’s personal and family story presents a unique overview of the tortured modern history of Iran and his reporting and analysis of the inner workings of the Islamic government give the audiences an unprecedented insight into the zeitgeist of modern Iran and the men who run it.

Maziar Bahari is an Iranian-Canadian journalist and filmmaker. He was a reporter for Newsweek from 1998 to 2011. Bahari graduated with a degree in communications from Concordia University in Montreal in 1993. He made his first film The Voyage of the Saint Louis in 1994 and another nine films between 1999 and 2010. A retrospective of Bahari’s films was organized by the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam in November 2007. He has also produced a number of documentaries and news reports for broadcasters around the world including, BBC, Channel4, HBO, Discovery, Canal+ and NHK.