ARTISTIC LICENCE

I expect you know who won the oscar recently for best picture. Yes, it was Ben Affleck - who also starred in and directed the film Argo.

He is a hugely talented individual and I wish his film well. It tells the story of how the Canadian government and the CIA managed to rescue six American diplomats from the clutches of the Iranian students who occupied the U.S. embassy during the 1979 Islamic revolution.

I expect to go and see it and perhaps you will too.

One word of warning though. It is not a documentary. What it is is a good yarn and like all good yarns it distorts the truth. What you will see is not what happened. 

In the film six U.S. embassy staff were refused refuge by British diplomats - just the opposite of what happened. In reality we did give the U.S. staff sanctuary.

Ben Affleck has stated that the film casts us in a bad light. ‘But I was setting up a situation where you needed to get a sense that these six people had nowhere else to go. It does not mean to diminish anyone,’ he said.

So when you sit down to watch the film - especially if you're American, don't forget to remember that what you are about to see should begin with 'Once upon a time, in the land of make-believe...'



 

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