"Bring Them Home" Film Screening & Directors Discussion

The National Press Club will host an evening film screening of “Bring them Home,” a powerful, timely short documentary from Washington Post Opinions about the growing crisis of Americans being held hostage by foreign governments. The 32-minute film will be followed by a discussion and audience Q&A with directors Kate Woodsome and Ray Whitehouse and Executive Producer Jason Rezaian.

“Bring Them Home” follows a Washington, D.C. family caught in the middle of longstanding U.S.-Iran tensions when American Emad Shargi is wrongfully imprisoned during a visit to Tehran. Shargi’s wife and daughters are forced into unlikely roles after Emad is taken hostage by the Iranian government as a pawn in nuclear negotiations.

With appearances by Robert Malley, the U.S. envoy for Iran, Roger Carstens, the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, and former deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes, the film shows a family in pain, grappling with the fallout of  complex diplomatic negotiations that can, at times, prioritize politics over people.

Speakers

Ray Whitehouse
Director, Producer, Cinematographer
Ray Whitehouse is a filmmaker and journalist who has filmed, produced and edited projects for The New York Times, National Geographic, TIME, Univision, and Al Jazeera. He is directing his first feature documentary, A Run for More.

Kate Woodsome
Director, Producer
Kate Woodsome leads video initiatives for Washington Post Opinions. An Edward R. Murrow Award-winning producer and recipient of the Ben Bradlee Award for Courage in Journalism, her work explores the motives and impacts of abuses of power, inequity and social division.

Jason Rezaian
Executive Producer
Washington Post Global Opinions writer Jason Rezaian ran the Post’s Tehran bureau from 2012 until Iranian authorities wrongly detained him in 2014. His 2019 memoir, Prisoner: My 544 Days in an Iranian Prison, is now a Crooked Media podcast, 544 Days.

Moderator

Martine Powers 

Martine Powers is the host of "Post Reports," The Washington Post's flagship daily news podcast. Known for her empathy and unique way of looking for details that don't make it onto the page, Powers and her team were recognized with a Peabody Award for producing a special podcast episode following the death of George Floyd,  answering a simple but genuinely enlightening question: “What about his life?”