Prior to the presidential elections in June, Sean Penn has been in Tehran for a few days, doing a series of reports for San Francisco Chronicle. The Chronicle will publish this five-day series in sequence. The reports of the first two days of Penn’s visit is now available online.
I read his first report. Although Penn gives a rather shallow and at times one-dimensional description of Iran’s political and social circumstances, it can be an interesting account, especially for non-Iranians or Iranians who have lost track of all the social changes during the last 15 years. Note that Penn, in his main observations, might have been led by a top-down process, meaning that he wanted to have a certain story and he has sought places and circumstances that could validate his original account. I will comment on his other reports later.
Day one: discovering a culture in conflict
Day two: meeting with the son of a former president
2 comments:
Actually I knew that he writes as a journalist but I hadn't read his reports before. But the fact that he become under the spotlight was interesting and I think he also didn't expect it and also enjoyed i very much!
As for his report, I didn't find it as good as I expected. There were too much details sometimes (for example, what happened to him in the immigration office of Iran, which I think it was informative) and there were little details when he went for the interviews (although they were very important).
I agree. Actually I like details like that. I think from the point of view of a non-Iranian, it is very interesting to know how one is treated by the officials, for example at the airport. This may explain the amount of stress he puts on these isuues. I, too, found his description of the interviews too short. As you said, he doesn't mention as much details about the interviews, I would add: on different levels. First he doesn't say much about how Rafsanjani behaved and reacted, or how the group was treated by rafsanjani's security people. Maybe they told him not to write about that (?). Second, he doesn't provide a full, or at least a rich account of what rafsanjani and himself told each other.
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