While nothing could possibly be as dramatic as the footage coming out of Iran these days, if you want to continue to focus on all things Persian even when the nightly news broadcast is over, you’ve got options.
Apple TV+ has just begun streaming the third season of the Emmy-winning Israeli drama series Tehran, available in the US and worldwide.
That’s good news for those who prefer to watch it with English subtitles, rather than the Hebrew ones that are available on KAN, Israel’s state broadcaster, which produced the series and aired it last year. While a certain amount of it is in English and Hebrew, most of the dialogue is in Farsi.
Given that so much time has passed since the previous season was shown, you might want to look up a plot summary or re-watch some of the old episodes, which are available on Apple TV+ and on KAN.
The various twists and double-crosses that came at the end of season two are too complicated to go into here, and it’s important to remember the details because the new season picks up right as the second season ends, with no time lapse.
What has really made the series work all these years is that, in addition to its espionage plot, it’s a portrait of the Iranian nation, both those who are yearning for freedom and those who want to maintain the oppressive status quo by any means possible.
This season, Mossad agent and cyber genius Tamar Rabinyan (Niv Sultan) is fleeing, as usual, and is taken in at a women’s shelter, where the residents and staff accept her as just another woman hiding from an abusive husband. This season gives an interesting glimpse of how these resourceful women manage to make a life for each other, and even the tough-as-nails Tamar is truly touched by them.
While Tamar uses the shelter as a base while trying to prevent a shipment of parts needed to build a nuclear bomb, there is a storyline about Eric Peterson, the head of a United Nations nuclear inspection team, played by Hugh Laurie of House.
Just as ornery as Dr. House, Peterson is openly contemptuous of the Iranian scientists and makes trouble for everyone around him. Tamar, laser focused on her mission, gets into hot water with her Mossad handlers, as she has in the past, and must figure out whether she can count on the wily, longtime sleeper Mossad agent “The Owl,” played with quiet menace by Sasson Gabay.
Prisoner 951
WHEN SO much is going on, it can be difficult to absorb it all, and Prisoner 951, the fact-based story of how one family suffered unbelievable cruelty at the hands of the Iranian government, is a moving and powerful story that illustrates just what the protesters are fighting for, and against. It’s available on Cellcom TV, Yes VOD, and Yes Binge, and HOT VOD and NEXT TV, starting January 20. It will be on every Tuesday at 10:00 p.m. on Hot Drama.
The series follows Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe (Narges Rashidi of Gangs of London), a British-Iranian citizen, as she is arrested at Tehran airport while returning to London after visiting her family in 2016.
Nazanin, who works arranging training courses for journalists for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, was utterly bewildered by the arrest and was held by Iran’s regime for years. The series was inspired by the memoir A Yard of Sky, written by Nazanin and her husband Richard Ratcliffe (Joseph Fiennes, the star of Shakespeare in Love and The Handmaid’s Tale), in which they chronicled their family’s struggle.
Nazanin suffers years of torture and isolation at various prisons all over Iran, while back in London, the initially mild-mannered Richard fought relentlessly fight for her freedom, including a global public campaign and a hunger strike in the heart of London, a struggle that eventually drew international attention. The two leads both give riveting performances in this gripping drama.
In addition, there’s a documentary about the Zaghari-Ratcliffe family, called Prisoner 951: The Hostages’ Story, which is on Yes Docu and Yes VOD and Hot 8 and Hot VOD. In it, the real couple tell their story and it also puts her abduction by the regime in a historical context.
Iranian movies on Apple TV+
THERE ARE a number of Iranian movies on Apple TV+. These include the Oscar-winning A Separation, a movie about a family in crisis where a wife leaves because she doesn’t want to care for her ailing father-in-law, which is by Asghar Farhadi. Farhadi is a director who has managed to keep making movies in Iran that criticize small aspects of society, and the regime has allowed him to keep working and even make movies abroad.
It may surprise you to see how much Tehran looks like Jerusalem, which makes sense since both are Middle Eastern cities in the mountains, much of which were built in the 1950s. Noora Niasari’s Shayda tells the story of an Iranian mother (Zar Amir Ebrahimi, the actress who co-directed the movie Tatami, with Guy Nattiv) living in Australia, who takes her daughter and flees an abusive husband. The film won an Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, and Ebrahimi gives a strong performance in the lead.
The best movie of all to see right now could be Argo, which is also available on Apple TV+. It has three things going for it: it’s suspenseful, often surprisingly funny, and based on a true story. Directed by and starring Ben Affleck, Argo won the Best Picture Oscar in 2013. It is set during the 1979 hostage crisis in Iran, when rioters overran the US Embassy in Tehran and took everyone they found there hostage. But it turns out that six American staffers managed to slip away out back and took refuge in the Canadian ambassador’s home. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were searching house to house for them and it was only a matter of time before they were discovered.
Enter Tony Mendez (Affleck), a CIA exfiltration expert. Watching Planet of the Apes with his son, he got an idea for a daring gambit to rescue the Americans: he would pretend to be a producer scouting locations for a Star Wars-type sci-fi film set in the desert. The escaped Americans would be crew members, and the CIA forged Canadian passports for them and a paper trail showing they had entered the country a few weeks before. A CIA official (Bryan Cranston) admits, “This is the best bad idea we have, by far.”
But they need a real American production company to come onboard to confirm the story, so he turns to a makeup artist (John Goodman at his unhinged best) the CIA had worked with before, who sends Mendez to Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin, in one of his best performances). Siegel, a Hollywood has-been, is up for anything and finds Mendez a lousy script he can pretend to be making. Telling Mendez exactly what to do, he says, “If I’m doing a fake movie, it’s gonna be a fake hit.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, bootleg copies of this movie have been popular with Iranian dissidents for years. “The scenes in Argo of angry mobs attacking the compound and their aggressive treatment of hostages reminded some younger Iranians of the violent crackdowns against the 2009 election uprisings, when pro-regime mobs attacked protesters and raided the campaign headquarters of opposition leaders… ‘When we see the uncompromising behavior of the government in the hostage crisis we subconsciously think of everything we have been through in the past few years,’ said Fereydoun, a 32-year-old in Tehran who watched the video and… declined to give her last name,” wrote Farnaz Fassihi in a 2013 article.