Maziar Bahari

Maziar Bahari ( fa, مازیار بهاری; born May 25, 1967) is an Iranian-Canadian journalist, filmmaker and human rights activist. He was a reporter for ''Newsweek'' from 1998 to 2011. Bahari was incarcerated by the Iranian government from June 21, 2009 to October 17, 2009, and has written a family memoir, '' Then They Came for Me'', a ''New York Times'' best seller. His memoir is the basis for Jon Stewart's 2014 film '' Rosewater''. Bahari later founded the IranWire citizen journalism news site, the freedom of expression campaign Journalism Is Not A Crime and the education and public art organizatio
Paint the Change

Family and education

Bahari was born in Tehran, Imperial State of Iran, but moved to Pakistan in 1987 before he immigrated to Canada in 1988 to study communications. His family has been involved in dissident politics in Iran: his father was imprisoned by the Shah's regime in the 1950s, and his sister Maryam under the revolutionary government of Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1980s. He is married to Paola Gourley, an Italian-English lawyer working in London, who gave birth to their first child in October 2009 shortly after his release from prison.

Career

He graduated with a degree in communications from Concordia University in Montreal in 1993, before continuing some additional studies at the nearby McGill University. Soon after, Bahari made his first film, ''The Voyage of the Saint Louis'', about the attempt by 937 German Jewish refugees to escape Nazi Germany on that ship in 1939, who were turned away by Cuba, the United States, and Canada, and ultimately forced to return to the Third Reich. In producing the film, Bahari became the first Muslim to make a film about the Holocaust. When asked what motivated him to make the film, he cited the courses he took at Concordia, where he:

studied the modern history of the Jews and I was fascinated by the history of the Jews in North America. I took a course on Freud and religion and the professor talked a lot about early 20th century anti-Semitism in the U.S. and Canada. I had no idea that even up until the 1950s Jews were discriminated against in North America, so I wanted to explore that further. As an immigrant, I was interested in the history of Jewish immigration from Europe to America. So I looked for a story to combine all these elements and came across the story of the St. Louis.

Later, while he was imprisoned in Iran the film "haunted" him, with his interrogators accusing him of being on a mission to work for Zionists.

In 1997 Bahari began reporting in Iran and making independent documentaries, and in 1998 he became ''Newsweek'' magazine's Iran correspondent.

He has produced a number of other documentaries and news reports for Channel 4, BBC
...