It’s now exactly a year since Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was released from her six-year detention in Iran, and we all know the relatively happy ending to her ordeal and that of her family. What we certainly do not know, however, is precisely how she and her loved ones coped, suffered and persevered through the mental torture of indefinite containment.
Channel 4’s new documentary, Nazanin, vividly conveys that tension in a way that is raw and sometimes almost unbearable to witness, but watch it we do because we want to “be there” when it dissolves. Because the filmmaker Darius Bazargan and his team spent so much time filming with Nazanin’s family and her tirelessly campaigning husband Richard, and has been able to use previously unseen smartphone video recordings by Nazanin herself, it is almost as if we are there with them.
