After Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was detained in Iran in 2016, the full picture wasn’t clear the cause of her detention – yet within three months, the outlines emerged. Richard Ratcliffe, her spouse, organized a media briefing. He gathered 780,000 supporters on a campaign for her release, and presented a written appeal calling for the her freedom from the then PM David Cameron. This came to light later, followed secret discussions with the UK foreign ministry in which government staff maintained that the best thing, both for Nazanin’s return and the well-being of her family members in Iran, was to keep quiet and let official channels proceed.
“It represented governmental hostage-taking,” notes the actor Joseph Fiennes, who plays Richard Ratcliffe in the BBC’s four-part drama the series Prisoner 951. “This clearly happens, and ordinary citizens and loved ones are totally disturbed and tarred for life. Having told this story, I view people charged with crimes of something, and I have doubts.”
Back in July 2016, it was evident that a grave injustice had occurred. Being a holder of two nationalities, Nazanin was imprisoned on accusations of spying, away from her two-year-old daughter. She faced charges of attempting to overthrow the government in Iran, of being employed by MI6, supporting female activism (in one interrogation) and earning money illegally. It sounded fanciful. Her job was with the news agency Reuters – though not in its reporting department, rather its non-profit branch – and she had legitimate business in Iran, traveling with her daughter to see her parents.
Were the allegations appeared questionable to an general viewers, it caused more worry even more in the expatriate Iranians, as actress Narges Rashidi, who portrays Nazanin and was from Khorramabad in Iran (moving to Germany when she was seven) confirms. “We were all very aware that there was no truth to the fabricated justifications they said she was being held.”
However, the UK had just undergone Brexit, and the day after that letter went to Cameron, Theresa May took over as prime minister. The news agenda only had eyes for political turmoil, and Johnson was appointed the top diplomat, with terrible consequences. Perhaps the greatest notice the family obtained then was when Johnson delivered his mistaken comments the next year, that she’d been “teaching people journalism, as I understand it”, which was incorrect and lent weight to the Iran’s government’s false charges, worsening her situation.
For all the information and occasional controversy, which Richard Ratcliffe tirelessly campaigned to sustain while she battled to preserve her hope, the emotional truth of this detention is deeply disturbing to see dramatized in the series. Rashidi, known for another drama, closely mimics Zaghari-Ratcliffe it’s astonishing. She credits her accent instructor: her actual English accent is transatlantic and she lives in LA.
Rashidi viewed all materials: interviews with Zaghari-Ratcliffe, and the gripping though subtle meeting with her daughter. There is also rare recordings surface: somehow the occasion of Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s arrest at the airport has made it online. “A brief clip; she had no idea that she was being filmed.”
In the drama, she is on a tightrope, caught between the confidence of her innocence and the doubt that, if you can be arrested over nothing, where does it lead? Looking back, that she would be in incarcerated for six long years, it is deeply distressing to see all this play out in the emotions on her face. Her struggle not to lose control; her unsuccessful try to oppose the turmoil of government authority. “From my perspective,” Rashidi says, “this is a distinct Nazanin to half a decade on. I observed a person extremely petrified and very gentle, not knowing what was occurring to her. I saw her resilience then, after this complete trial.”
Fiennes “had the privilege of sitting with Richard”, he says. “Such access is rare with the person you’re playing, and his profession is forensic accounting. The persistence, where you arrive at the stage of ‘Show me the {bloody receipt|actual proof|concrete evidence’, is part of his nature.” It becomes a painful watch too, as this traditionally minded individual first slowly then rapidly becomes disillusioned in the things he used to trust: advisors, civil servants, the administration, other establishment guys. “He felt the British government would manage the situation, but this proved incorrect. He faced continuous falsehoods, misled again and again.”
Richard Ratcliffe encountered five foreign ministers during the time his spouse was detained: Johnson, Hunt, Raab, Truss and Cleverly. Both individuals would repeatedly become the lowest priority on the minister’s to-do list once they assumed office, and once they considered the situation, their time in office was over. Within the series, it demands that Ratcliffe to see that “there’s a military industrial complex at play here,” Fiennes says, “and it lacks openness. It works behind official channels, and this is a family that got caught up with that.”
One scene in which Ratcliffe enters angrily the minister’s room (he then held the position for the MENA region), “and just rants at him. He completely loses composure. His appearance is disheveled. He is engaged in the eighteenth day without food, he is in despair. Yet it requires much for Richard to get to that place. {He’s not liberated|He isn
