Director Jon Stewart’s (The Daily Show) striking debut is a powerfully affecting docudrama based on the true story of Maziar Bahari (Gael Garcia Bernal), a political journalist whose appearance on Stewart’s show in 2009 precipitated a five-month imprisonment at the hands of the Iranian government.

In 2009, Iranian Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari was in Tehran covering Iran's volatile elections for Newsweek. One of the few reporters 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 Tehran's authorities got the joke they didn't like it, subsequently rousting Bahari from his family home and throwing him in prison on the charge of treason.

Stewarts’s vivid recreation of the events leading up to Bahari’s arrest and his months-long imprisonment and interrogation features a potent and persuasive performance by Gael García Bernal (No, The Motorcycle Diaries) as Bahari and Kim Bodnia (from TV's The Bridge) as the prison interrogator who’s mission it is to break Bahari’s spirit and obtain a confession that he is a spy. Recounting Bahari's efforts to maintain his hope and his sanity in the face of isolation and persecution through memories of his family, recollections of the music he loves, and thoughts of his wife and unborn child, this is both a moving personal story and a tribute to those journalists who risk their freedom, and even their lives, to tell the true stories behind world-changing events.

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