July 5, 2024
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe‘s six-year ordeal as an accused spy will be told in a BBC factual drama series about to be filmed. Deadline, a Hollywoodbased website of entertainment industry news, reported June 4 that the British broadcaster is adapting Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s upcoming book, A Yard of Sky: A Story of Love, Resistance and Hope, which she co-wrote with her husband, Richard Ratcliffe.
The four-part drama will chronicle Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s experience, from the day the charity worker was arrested in Tehran in April 2016 on spying charges, to her release in March 2022. It will also portray Richard Ratcliffe’s fight to free his wife, including him staging a hunger strike outside Britain’s Foreign Office. Deadline said production was expected to start late in June, with filming taking place in the UK and Europe. It is not yet known who will play ZaghariRatcliffe and her family.
The show is editorially independent of Zaghari-Ratcliffe, but she has signed off on the adaptation of her book and Dancing Ledge, the production company, will consult her on issues of accuracy. In an interview with the BBC last month, she revealed that she had suffered from PTSD and depression since her return to England.
“Freedom is sweet, it’s amazing, but it’s not easy,” Zaghari-Ratcliffe said. A BBC spokesperson said: “Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Richard Ratcliffe’s extraordinary experiences captured everyone’s hearts; their journey is one of despair, courage and hope, spanning two countries and six years, and ultimately, it’s a story of how this family, who were forced apart by international events, were finally reunited.”
A Yard of Sky is scheduled for publication September 26 by Penguin Random House’s Chatto & Windus imprint. The book’s blurb states: “When a man suddenly appeared and marched Nazanin away, they couldn’t know their family was about to be changed forever. That moment would test their love, confront five foreign secretaries and take an ordinary family behind the curtain of international hostage diplomacy and secret debts.”
