November 14 will mark the theatrical release of Rosewater, Jon Stewart’s film about the harrowing 2009 ordeal of Maziar Bahari, the Canadian/Iranian playwright, filmmaker and former Newsweek correspondent. During that summer, security officers from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps arrived unannounced at the Tehran apartment he shared with his mother, seizing his laptop, several of his…

Classic melodrama, Iranian style. Maziar Bahari, a well-known Iranian-Canadian journalist, visits his ancestral homeland in 2009. He reports about the idealistic crowds brutalized following the presidential re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and is incarcerated by the Iranian government. They throw him into solitary confinement, call him a spy, and try to beat a confession out of him,…