After the British-Iranian woman was taken into custody in Iran in 2016, it wasn’t immediately obvious why she was held – however after 100 days, the outlines emerged. Her partner Richard Ratcliffe, spoke publicly to the press. He gathered 780,000 names on a appeal for her freedom, and delivered a letter demanding the same thing from former PM David Cameron. This came to light later, followed murky meetings with the British diplomatic service in which government staff maintained that the most prudent course, to ensure Nazanin’s return and the security of her relatives in Iran, was to keep quiet and let diplomacy proceed.
“It was state hostage-taking,” says Joseph Fiennes, who portrays Richard Ratcliffe in the BBC television drama Prisoner 951. “Such practices continue, and blameless individuals and families are completely disrupted and scarred permanently. Having told this story, I look at any individual facing accusations with wrongdoing, and I am skeptical.”
During that July in 2016, it was clear that a grave injustice had occurred. A dual national, Nazanin was kept in detention on accusations of spying, apart from her two-year-old daughter. She faced charges of attempting to overthrow the Tehran administration, of working for MI6, “empowering women” (in one interrogation) and engaging in illicit earnings. The claims seemed far-fetched. She was employed by the press outlet Reuters – but not even its reporting department, instead its non-profit branch – and she had appropriate purposes in Iran, traveling with her daughter to meet her parents.
Had the accusations seemed suspicious to an unschooled audience, it rang louder alarm bells even more in the expatriate Iranians, as Narges Rashidi, who plays Nazanin and was a native of Khorramabad in Iran (relocating to Germany when she was seven) states. “Everyone knew that there was no validity to the false pretexts they said she was being held.”
However, the UK had just undergone Brexit, and the next day the appeal reached Cameron, Theresa May became as leader. The news agenda was fixated on constitutional chaos, and Boris Johnson unexpectedly became foreign secretary, leading to disastrous outcomes. Likely the peak of public awareness the Zaghari-Ratcliffes obtained then was when Johnson delivered his mistaken comments the subsequent year, that she’d been “instructing individuals in journalism, as I understand it”, which was incorrect and gave heft to the Iran’s government’s fabricated claims, worsening her situation.
For all the information and occasional controversy, which Ratcliffe diligently fought to keep alive while Nazanin struggled to stay resilient, the emotional truth of this detention is utterly shocking to see reenacted in the show. Rashidi, featured in a previous series, closely mimics Zaghari-Ratcliffe it’s uncanny. She attributes this to her dialect coach: her natural speech pattern is neutral and she resides in Los Angeles.
Rashidi viewed all materials: conversations featuring Zaghari-Ratcliffe, and the gripping though subtle return to her daughter. Additionally, rare recordings surface: for some reason the moment 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 walking a fine line, caught between the belief in her righteousness and the doubt that, if you can be arrested 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 fight not to respond excessively; her unsuccessful try to resist the chaos of government authority. “In my view,” Rashidi says, “that is a very different Nazanin to six years later. I observed a person extremely petrified and quite vulnerable, not knowing the events unfolding to her. I saw her resilience then, after this complete trial.”
Fiennes “was fortunate of meeting with Richard”, he says. “Such access is rare with the person you’re playing, and he works in financial investigation. The persistence, where you reach the point of ‘Show me the {bloody receipt|actual proof|concrete evidence’, is part of his nature.” This renders it a difficult viewing too, as this pretty establishment guy gradually then quickly loses his faith in the things he used to trust: experts, officials, the government, other mainstream figures. “He assumed the UK authorities would handle the matter, but it didn’t happen. He was just lied to, lied to and lied to.”
Richard Ratcliffe went through five foreign ministers during the time his spouse was detained: a succession of officials. The couple would always be the last thing on the minister’s to-do list after they’d settled into the post, and once they considered the situation, their time in office was over. Within the series, it requires time for Ratcliffe to see that “there’s a military industrial complex operating here,” Fiennes says, “and it’s not transparent. It lives beneath the government, and here is a household that became entangled in it.”
There’s a bit in which Ratcliffe enters angrily the minister’s room (he served as the official for the Middle East and North Africa), “and unleashes a tirade. He really does unravel. He’s unkempt. He is undertaking day 18 of a hunger strike, he’s at rock bottom. But it takes a lot for Richard to get to that place. {He’s not liberated|He isn
