Worldrenown Iranian born filmmaker Maziar Bahari’s latest documentary, To Light a Candle, a story about injustices in educational opportunities created by various Iranian governments, will be shown Saturday, March 14, at 2pm in St. Helens Hall at 135 NW Idaho Ave. in Bend.
Using compelling interviews, personal stories and dramatic archive footage – often smuggled out of Iran at great personal risk – Bahari focuses on the persecution of the Baha’is in Iran and, in particular, the efforts of the Iranian Baha’i community to educate its own young adults.
The Baha’is are a religious minority in Iran. They are systematically imprisoned, tortured and killed by the Iranian government. The Islamic regime bans the Baha’is to study or teach in Iranian universities. The film unveils decades of repression, persecution and intimidation against a peaceful community of Iranians whose lives have been dramatically undermined by religious intolerance by the Iranian ruling class.
Instead of accepting the Islamic government’s expulsion of Baha’i professors and students in 1979 following the Iranian Revolution, the Baha’is took matters in their own hands and created a unique religious university, the Baha’i Institute for Higher Education (BIHE) in 1987; BIHE now offers 17 degree programs with a faculty numbering close to 1,000.
Bahari, the Iranian correspondent for Newsweek magazine, was sent to former Persia in 1998, but in June 2009, Bahari, after covering several antigovernment protests, was arrested and dumped in Evin Prison until his release 118 days later.
A family memoir centered on his captivity titled Then They Came for Me was released in 2011 and became a New York Times best seller. Later it became the basis for the 2014 film Rosewater that was written and directed by The Daily Show host Jon Stewart.
The film is being shown throughout the country as part of the global Education Is Not A Crime campaign.
The Bend screening is made possible through a joint partnership between INCO, the Interfaith Network of Central Oregon, and the Central Oregon Baha’i community and is free to the public.
Jim Slothower
541-420-2543
jnsloth19@gmail.com
