After Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was arrested in Iran in 2016, it wasn’t immediately obvious the cause of her detention – but within 100 days, we had the contours. Her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, spoke publicly to the press. He had amassed 780,000 signatures on a campaign for her liberation, and sent a message demanding the same thing from former PM David Cameron. This, it transpired much later, followed private talks with the UK foreign ministry in which officials argued that the safest approach, to ensure Nazanin’s freedom and the well-being of her relatives in Iran, was to remain discreet and let diplomacy work.
“It represented governmental hostage-taking,” notes Joseph Fiennes, who portrays Richard Ratcliffe in the four-episode BBC series Prisoner 951. “This clearly happens, and blameless individuals and loved ones are totally disturbed and stigmatized forever. And now I’ve told this story, I regard people charged with crimes with wrongdoing, and I don’t quite believe it.”
Back in July 2016, it was plain that a grave injustice had occurred. A dual national, Nazanin was held in jail on spying charges, separated from her little girl. Authorities alleged of seeking to destabilize the Tehran administration, of working for MI6, “empowering women” (in a questioning session) and obtaining funds unlawfully. The allegations appeared fabricated. She worked for the media organization Reuters – though not in its reporting department, instead its charitable foundation – and she had valid reasons in Iran, bringing her child to see her parents.
Had the accusations appeared questionable to an uninformed public, it raised greater concerns still in the Iranian community abroad, as Rashidi, who portrays Nazanin and was a native of Khorramabad in Iran (relocating to Germany when she was seven) attests. “It was widely understood that there was no validity to the fabricated justifications they said she was being held.”
Yet Britain was newly post-Brexit, and the next day that letter went to Cameron, Theresa May assumed office as prime minister. The news agenda concentrated solely on political turmoil, and Boris Johnson unexpectedly became foreign secretary, with dire results. Likely the peak of public awareness the family obtained then was when Johnson uttered his inaccurate statements the next year, that she’d been “teaching people journalism, as I understand it”, which was incorrect and gave heft to the Iran’s government’s trumped up allegations, worsening her situation.
Notwithstanding the data and intermittent debate, which Richard Ratcliffe tirelessly campaigned to maintain while Nazanin struggled to preserve her hope, the personal experience of this kidnapping is deeply disturbing to see brought to life in the show. Rashidi, known for another drama, closely mimics Zaghari-Ratcliffe it’s astonishing. She says that’s all testament to her language trainer: her actual English accent is neutral and she lives in LA.
Rashidi viewed all materials: discussions with Zaghari-Ratcliffe, and the gripping though subtle reunion with her daughter. There is also unexpected video exists: inexplicably the occasion of Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s detention at the airport has made it online. “A short video segment; she had no idea that she was being filmed.”
Throughout the show, she is balancing precariously, suspended between the belief in her righteousness and the uncertainty that, should you be detained over no reason, what is the limit? Knowing what we know now, that she would be in prison for six years, it is profoundly upsetting to see the situation develop in the emotions on her face. Her struggle not to overreact; her unsuccessful try to oppose the turmoil of official might. “To me,” Rashidi says, “this is a distinct Nazanin to the later period. I observed a person extremely petrified and quite vulnerable, unaware what was occurring to her. I encountered her fortitude later, after this whole ordeal.”
The actor “enjoyed the opportunity of conversing with Ratcliffe”, he says. “Such access is rare with the person you’re playing, and he’s a forensic accountant. The tenacity, where you reach the point of ‘Show me the {bloody receipt|actual proof|concrete evidence’, is in his DNA.” This renders it a heartbreaking experience too, as this pretty establishment guy gradually then quickly loses trust in the institutions he believed in: experts, officials, the government, other establishment guys. “He assumed the London administration would manage the situation, but that wasn’t the case. He faced continuous falsehoods, misled again and again.”
Ratcliffe dealt with five top diplomats during the time his spouse was detained: Johnson, Hunt, Raab, Truss and Cleverly. The couple would repeatedly become the final item on the minister’s to-do list following their appointment, and once they examined the predicament, their term had ended. In the drama, it demands that Ratcliffe to see that “there’s a military industrial complex operating here,” Fiennes says, “and it’s not transparent. It works behind official channels, and these are individuals that became entangled in it.”
One scene in which Ratcliffe bursts into the office of Cleverly (he then held the position for the relevant area), “and unleashes a tirade. He completely loses composure. His appearance is disheveled. He is engaged in a prolonged fast, he has hit the lowest point. Yet it requires much for him to arrive there. {He’s not liberated|He isn
