Jon Stewart is not a journalist but as host of the popular “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central, Stewart ranks as a key news source for many young Americans.
With the release of Rosewater, the first movie he has directed, Stewart is drawing his wide audience to a story about the dangers news
correspondents face working in repressive regimes.
Rosewater
was adapted from a memoir by Maziar Bahari, a London-based journalist, about his incarceration in Iran. Bahari won OPC’s
2009 Joe and Laurie Dine award for best international reporting dealing with human rights.
Rosewater
opened Nov. 14, the 116th day of imprisonment in Iran for Jason Rezaian of The Washington Post, who has been held without charge in
Iran since July 22. Rezaian is being held in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison, the same place where Bahari was jailed. According to the Committee to Protect
Journalists Rezaian, 35 journalists are imprisoned in Iran.
In 2009, Bahari was in Iran covering the protests following that country’s disputed presidential election when he and dozens of other journalists were
arrested. He was accused of being a spy, jailed for 118 days, held in solitary confinement, interrogated and repeatedly tortured. He was let out on bail,
left the country and later with Aimee Molloy wrote Then They Came for Me about his experience.
In a “Daily Show” sketch shortly before his arrest, Bahari, an Iranian-Canadian journalist and documentary filmmaker, pretended he was a spy. His
captors used the footage against him. Stewart took a three-month leave from his show to become writer/director of Rosewater.
Bahari said he was usually blindfolded when being interrogated and the film’s title refers to the name he gave his brutal interrogator, a man he
knew only by smell – a mix of sweat and rosewater.