A new BBC series titled “Prisoner 951” depicts the harrowing and true story of British-Iranian Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who was arbitrarily detained in Iran for almost six years, and the subsequent campaign led by her husband Richard Ratcliffe to secure her release.
The four-part miniseries premiered on Nov. 23 on the BBC. Zaghari-Ratcliffe is played by Iranian born American-German actress Narges Rashidi, and Richard Ratcliffe is played by British actor Joseph Fiennes. Elika Ashoori, an actress and the daughter of the British-Iranian Anoosheh Ashoori — a former prisoner who was released at the same time as Zaghari-Ratcliffe — also appears in the series.
“The aspiration for me and Nazanin was to highlight that there is this phenomenon called hostage diplomacy. The Iranian regime takes hostages. It takes people from other countries. The way most governments handle this is not good enough,” Richard Ratcliffe told Kayhan Life in an interview. “The other thing I wanted it to do was not to be a sad story, but to be a story that ended on hope and survival.”
“It’s a story about cruelty, but it’s also about survival, about resilience, and it’s a story about the human care you see in all the corners. It’s a very human depiction of Iran. You see even the guards and their emotions, their upset about things and being very sympathetic, which is actually our experience of the Iranian system,” Ratcliffe added. “It felt like it was a really caring production with a lot of thought, and a lot of care, and a lot of humanity.”
The drama charts the mother of one’s ordeal from her arrest to her release, and how her detention affected her family and the UK government’s foreign policy on Iran. Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s detention was linked to an estimated $557 million debt owed by the UK to Iran for tanks ordered by the Shah of Iran shortly before the 1979 Iranian revolution which were never delivered.
“I met Joseph Fiennes beforehand and had a long chat, about four or five hours, and it was really just him trying to get his head around what it was like to stand in those shoes, and what I got cross about,” Ratcliffe said about the production of the film. “I think he was naturally taken by the British side, and essentially the opaqueness of what the UK government was doing.”
Zaghari-Ratcliffe was arrested in 2016 and detained by Iran’s regime for more than 5 years on charges including “plotting to topple the Iranian government,” which the US and the UK called “baseless.” She was charged again in 2021 for spreading propaganda against the regime and sentenced to a further year in prison.
Ashoori was sentenced to 12 years in Iran in 2017 for espionage, a charge he repeatedly denied. A final appeal submitted by Ashoori’s lawyers for his conditional release and to set aside his sentence was rejected in 2021 by Iran’s judiciary, the same day Zaghari-Ratcliffe was notified that she had lost her appeal against her one-year sentence.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Ashoori’s releases on March 17, 2022 coincided with the settlement of the long-standing debt owed by the UK to Iran, which was paid on the same day. The British government has not confirmed that the payment was linked to an agreement with Iran’s government to secure their releases.
A BBC documentary about Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s case also aired on the same day as the miniseries and included interviews with: Zaghari-Ratcliffe; Richard Ratcliffe; Elika and Anoosheh Ashoori; former prisoner and Australian academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert; and former detainee and Iranian-American journalist Jason Rezaian.
Several scenes in the documentary show home video footage shot in real time of Richard and his daughter Gabriella, as Nazanin found herself detained and then imprisoned in Iran.
“We did not record anything at the beginning of Nazanin being taken, but at some point quite early on, we started working with a documentary maker and then stopped, and then later on picked it up again,” Richard said. “I remember thinking, I don’t know what else we can do but documenting what’s going on, like sunlight, is a form of safety.”
“There was that ‘my camera is my weapon.’ That aspect of having a camera there to record. So when I did the second hunger strike from the UK Foreign Office, I was worried that we’d get thrown off in the middle of the night. So I asked the documentary maker to come and sleep in the tent that first night. And indeed, we did get woken up at three in the morning, but it changes the way you get treated when the first person that comes out of the tent is a man with a camera,” Richard said.
The documentary opens with Nazanin sewing as she recalls her own experience of engaging with her ordeal — followed by a video recording of Nazanin during her detention in which she proclaims her innocence.
“I haven’t committed a crime,” Nazanin says in the video. “I have every right to be with my child and my husband after nearly five years.”
In another video recording, Nazanin adds: “The UK government is not really helping me. I was a political pawn, a victim of something that did not have anything to do with me, and I am still paying the price for it.”
Reflecting on the turning points of Nazanin’s case, Ratcliffe said there were several defining moments for them as a family. These included the then UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s comment aired on television that Nazanin had been teaching journalism to students in Iran.
Iran’s government views journalists as a potentially hostile group because they give coverage to anti-government actions — such as the 2022 nationwide protests against the government and the unlawful deaths of protesters by Iran’s security forces which followed. Johnson tried, unsuccessfully, to broker a deal with Iran to release Nazanin following the comments, which caused outrage in the UK among campaigners and human rights watchdogs.
“Prior to Boris Johnson making those comments, our case had been subdued down. The government policy was to wait for parole, which was coming up. Then there was this new court case, and Boris gave the ammunition to justify that court case,” Ratcliffe said. “So on day one it probably didn’t change things in Iran, but it changed things in terms of how that was understood in the UK, and then it became politically much more of a raised status, and we went from being in the middle pages of the international sections in newspapers — a small story — to suddenly being on the front pages.”
“Then we got granted diplomatic protection, and that was transformative.” Richard said. “There’s something about how we went from frustration and impasse to Nazanin coming home, and it comes in part through the drama, the power of solidarity, and the importance of people caring, and that kind of honesty of the outside view just looking outraged, and like this is wrong. So I think an important part of our story is that we are a happy ending, but we weren’t a happy ending by magic.”
