Movie Review

This film combines contemporary newsreel footage with recent taped interviews. The focus is on the Tehran embassy hostages of 1979–1981 and their families. The taped testimony of hostages such as Moorhead Kennedy and Barry Rosen stands at the film's center. There are also interviews with some Iranian student hostage takers, notably Ibrahim Ascharzadeh. Other figures—notably the State Department Iran desk officer Henry Precht and the White House adviser Hamilton Jordan on the United States side and former president Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr on the Iranian—give their recollections of the crisis. Several of the hostage interviews evoke the agony of the captured American diplomats (and of their families back home) in vivid and telling detail. Some of the film shot in 1979–1980 (for example, the images of revolutionary Iranian students laboriously piecing together shredded embassy documents) is fascinating and memorable.

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Various events punctuated the grim existence of the hostages. The film conveys very skillfully the drama attending events such as the original capture, interrogations, and torture; the visit of Rev. William Sloane Coffin at Christmas 1979; the pantomimic firing squad of February 1980; the visit of Barbara Timm (mother of hostage Kevin Hermening) in April 1980; the scattering of the hostages after the rescue mission; the move back to a Tehran prison; and the confusion and euphoria of the final release.

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