[lbo-talk] Rageh inside Iran

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Fri Jun 26 23:17:02 PDT 2009


For those who are interested in Iran, mainly Teheran, below is a link to an hour and a half, photojournal/travel feature called `Rageh inside Iran'.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9161934809152225169

It's the best thing I've found so far on the internet. Here is the wiki on Rageh Omaar:

``Rageh Omaar (Somali: Raage Awmaar,.. (born 19 July, 1967) is a Somali-British television news presenter and writer. His latest book Only Half of Me deals with the tensions between these two sides of his identity. He used to be a BBC world affairs correspondent, where he made his name reporting from Iraq. In September 2006, he moved to a new post at Al Jazeera English, where he currently presents the nightly weekday documentary series Witness.''

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rageh_Omaar

The feature is long but there is rarely a moment that isn't filled with rich woven meanings that Omaar may or may not have seen. His main contact with the true working class level, turned out to be Omaar's taxis cab driver and his family.

My only critque is that Omaar was a man and in a segregated society, it limited his contact with women. If he ever takes another visit he needs to do a man and woman piece with a woman journalist and then collabrate on the finished product. There is a kind of interesting dialectic that comes from the west in such a project, that reveals the western form of segregation by gender on just about any subject.

Hey other items of interest. There seems to be a lot spontaneous dancing, which is something I rarely saw here as a delivery driver. There is one level that is completely missing, where my experience took me and that was the really dirt poor. They always exist somewhere, and it is very important to see them and show them.

CG



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