Synopsis
In 2009, Iranian Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari was covering Iran's volatile elections for Newsweek. One of the few reporters living in the country with access to US media, he made an appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, in a taped interview with comedian Jason Jones. The interview was intended as satire, but if the Tehran authorities got the joke they didn't like it - and it would quickly came back to haunt Bahari when he was rousted from his family home and thrown into prison.
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Cast
- Gael García BernalMaziar Bahari
- Shohreh AghdashlooMoloojoon
- Jason JonesJason Jones
- Haluk BilginerBaba Akbar
- Nasser FarisHaj Agha
- Andrew GowerJimmy the avid editor
- Kim BodniaJavadi (Rosewater)
- Dimitri LeonidasDavood
- Golshifteh FarahaniMaryam
- Claire FoyPaola
Recommendations
- 90
Village Voice
Rosewater is an earnest picture, but it's also got some juice — there's vitality and feeling in it, the secret ingredients so often missing from even the most well-intentioned first features. - 80
Variety
Stewart’s confident, superbly acted debut feature works as both a stirring account of human endurance and a topical reminder of the risks faced by journalists in pursuit of the truth. - 80
The Dissolve
Like The Daily Show, Rosewater makes uncomfortable political realities into wry but uproarious jokes. - 75
Film.com
The humor and drama don’t neutralize each other; in what’s perhaps Stewart’s most successful achievement as a director, the changes in tone work in a harmony, not at cross-purposes. - 75
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
Rosewater was the name Bahari gave his persecutor (Kim Bodnia), a cunning, perfumed older man charged with getting a confession from this Westernized Iranian, a confession that discredits his reporting and the bad light Iran is in since the election, with its ensuing violent government crackdown on protesters. - 67
The Playlist
For better or worse, torture-themed films don’t get too much easier to take than this one. - 63
Slant Magazine
It shrugs off the bigger questions about Iranian politics its first half appears to raise, falling back instead on a gestalt of the eternal, Kafkaesque regime, wherever the viewer may find it. - 60
The Hollywood Reporter
The performances are all sincere and solid and the situation is easy to respond to emotionally. But as a case history in the annals of political repression, it feels like a bit of a side show.
