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Duke Experts Screen Jon Stewart’s Iran Movie Rosewater March 17

Gael Garcia Bernal stars as Canadian-Iranian journalist Maziar Bahari.
Gael Garcia Bernal stars as Canadian-Iranian journalist Maziar Bahari.

Film theorist Negar Mottahedeh and journalist Phil Bennett, both Duke University professors, will hold a public Q & A on Tuesday, March 17, following a 7 p.m. screening of “Rosewater” at the Griffith Film Theater.  

The directorial debut of The Daily Show host Jon Stewart, the film is based on Iranian-Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari’s harrowing tale of his imprisonment for “spying” while covering street riots over the results of the 2009 Iranian election — and the international publicity campaign that eventually led to his release.

Bennett is director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy and the Eugene C. Patterson Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy. He was the managing editor of The Washington Post between 2005-2009, managing editor of FRONTLINE from 2011-2013, and has been an editor of international and national security coverage and a foreign correspondent.

Mottahedeh is associate professor of literature and women’s studies. In her class on social media and social movements, she teaches how the mass uprising following the 2009 Iranian election, and subsequent government crackdown, became “the first popular and unremitting revolt to be reported minute by minute by citizen journalists on social media” and “made the Iranian uprising for justice and civil liberties palpable around the globe.” Her new book “#iranelection: Hashtag Solidarity and the Transformation of Online life” (Stanford University Press), about this social media mobilization, will be published this spring.

The free, public screening is sponsored by the Program in the Arts of the Moving Image (AMI), the Duke Islamic Studies Center (DISC), the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy, the Duke Human Rights Center at the Franklin Humanities Institute (DHRC@FHI), and ISLAMiCommentary.

Paid parking is available at the Bryan Center.