Current Events and the Big Screen: ‘Rosewater’ and the Arab Spring

By Haley Houseman.

Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show encourages us to take our current events with both seriousness and levity, but the crux of his directorial debut is the cost and power that such glibness can have. Rosewater, adapted from the memoir And Then They Came For Me by Maziar Bahari, chronicles the Arab Spring from behind a camera and inside a prison cell. It seeks to remind audiences in the United States the costs of the revolutionary protests that we laud on Twitter and in major media.

Starring Gael García Bernal as Maziar Bahari, a journalist visiting his native Iran to cover el...

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