Maziar Bahari
| Maziar Bahari | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
May 25, 1967 Tehran, Iran |
| Citizenship | Iranian Canadian |
| Occupation | Filmmaker and journalist |
| Website | http://www.maziarbahari.com |
Maziar Bahari (Persian: مازیار بهاری; born May 25, 1967) is an Iranian Canadianjournalist, film maker and human rights activist. He was a reporter for Newsweek from 1998 to 2011. Bahari was incarcerated by the Iranian government from June 2009 to October 20, 2009, and has written a New York Times best seller family memoir, Then They Came for Me. His memoir is the basis for Jon Stewart's 2014 film Rosewater. In 2014 he produced and directed the documentary film To Light a Candle about the persecution of Bahá'ís in Iran and the Bahá'í Institute for Higher Education.
Bahari was born in Tehran, Iran, but moved to Canada in 1988 to study Film and Political Science. His family has been involved in dissident politics in Iran: his father was imprisoned by the Shah's regime in the 1950s, and his sister Maryam under the revolutionary government of Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1980s. She later died of leukemia. He is married to Paola Gourley, an Italian-English lawyer working in London, who gave birth to their first child in October 2009 shortly after his release from prison.
He graduated with a degree in communications from Concordia University in Montreal in 1993, before continuing some additional studies at the nearby McGill University. Soon after, Bahari made his first film, The Voyage of the Saint Louis, about the attempt by 937 German Jewish refugees to escape Nazi Germany on that ship in 1939, who were turned away by Cuba, the United States, and Canada, and ultimately forced to return to the Third Reich. In producing the film, Bahari became the first Muslim to make a film about the Holocaust. When asked what motivated him to make the film, he cited the courses he took at Concordia, where he:
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