In 2012, freelance journalist Theo Padnos slipped into Syria to cover its unfolding civil war and was promptly kidnapped by members of an al-Qaeda branch.
Convinced he was a CIA agent because he spoke Arabic, the group held the Massachusetts native for nearly two years before releasing him in August 2014.
Now, Padnos is retracing his journey in Theo Who Lived, a documentary being screened on Sept. 30 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Its theatrical premiere is in New York City on Oct. 7, followed by a wider release.
Photo: AP
Padnos, 47, who has been living in Paris and Vermont, tells the Associated Press he’s grateful to have survived.
The ordeal not only changed his outlook on life but also gave him perspective on the Syrian conflict that he feels is important to share.
Padnos is working on a nonfiction book, a play and a novel drawing on his experience. He wrote about his captivity for the New York Times Magazine shortly after his release and is trying to continue writing about the region as a journalist.
“I had a real spiritual voyage, which was terrifying for me and my family at the time,” Padnos said from his family’s vacation home in Vermont. “But looking back, this is what life gave me and I’d like to take what I learned and turn it into some positive benefit.”
CLINGING TO HOPE
The film follows Padnos as he returns to places in Turkey and Israel that figured prominently in his 22-month capture. The film crew never set foot in Syria. Padnos reflects on his captivity on sets emulating his tiny prison cell and the room he was subjected to torture and beatings.
Along the Turkey-Syria border, he recalls the moment when his travelling companions instruct him to dash across the field and hop the razor wire fence separating them from Syria.
It’s a moment Padnos says he’d replay in his mind for months after.
The trio of men had claimed they were providing supplies to the Free Syrian Army and offered to take him across the border with them. But they were actually affiliated with al-Qaeda. They staged a fake interview, beat him and took him hostage shortly after crossing the border.
“This is where I threw my life away. It’s like a precipice that I walked up to and I actually jumped,” Padnos says in the film. “Now I’m back in a safe place and I’m thinking why did I ever jump?”
Padnos also details a series of failed escapes, including one in which cellmate and American photojournalist Matthew Schrier managed to sneak out through a narrow prison window but Padnos could not.
Padnos’ mother, Nancy Curtis, who is interviewed in the documentary, says she still has mixed emotions about her son’s release. During the ordeal, she became close to the parents of other Americans kidnapped by extremists overseas. Many of them were not as fortunate as her family, she says.
Curtis and other family members, working with the US and Qatari governments, successfully arranged for Padnos’ release just days after the Islamic State beheaded New Hampshire journalist James Foley in a video. The family maintains that no ransom was paid.
“I always clung to the hope that he’d come home,” Curtis said. “But I also don’t feel great joy and happiness. Probably anyone who has had a solider in the war who came home but knows others that didn’t have similar emotions.”
‘VERY HUMAN’
Director David Schisgall says Padnos’ story is a rare eyewitness account of life inside a jihadi group by an outsider with a deep understanding of the region’s language and culture.
Having spent years prior studying Arabic and Islam in Yemen and Syria, Padnos was able to build trust and friendships with some of his captors.
Near the end of his captivity, he was given greater freedoms and even traveled personally with the then-high commander of al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria.
“The real intimacy he developed with his captors was remarkable,” Schisgall said. “It’s a very important message for Americans to see these people fighting as complicated individuals who are both very dangerous but also very human.”
When 17-year-old Lin Shih (林石) crossed the Taiwan Strait in 1746 with a group of settlers, he could hardly have known the magnitude of wealth and influence his family would later amass on the island, or that one day tourists would be walking through the home of his descendants in central Taiwan. He might also have been surprised to see the family home located in Wufeng District (霧峰) of Taichung, as Lin initially settled further north in what is now Dali District (大里). However, after the Qing executed him for his alleged participation in the Lin Shuang-Wen Rebellion (林爽文事件), his grandsons were
A jumbo operation is moving 20 elephants across the breadth of India to the mammoth private zoo set up by the son of Asia’s richest man, adjoining a sprawling oil refinery. The elephants have been “freed from the exploitative logging industry,” according to the Vantara Animal Rescue Centre, run by Anant Ambani, son of the billionaire head of Reliance Industries Mukesh Ambani, a close ally of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The sheer scale of the self-declared “world’s biggest wild animal rescue center” has raised eyebrows — including more than 50 bears, 160 tigers, 200 lions, 250 leopards and 900 crocodiles, according to
They were four years old, 15 or only seven months when they were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald and Ravensbruck. Some were born there. Somehow they survived, began their lives again and had children, grandchildren and even great grandchildren themselves. Now in the evening of their lives, some 40 survivors of the Nazi camps tell their story as the world marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most notorious of the death camps. In 15 countries, from Israel to Poland, Russia to Argentina, Canada to South Africa, they spoke of victory over absolute evil. Some spoke publicly for the first
I am kneeling quite awkwardly on a cushion in a yoga studio in London’s Shoreditch on an unseasonably chilly Wednesday and wondering when exactly will be the optimum time to rearrange my legs. I have an ice-cold mango and passion fruit kombucha beside me and an agonising case of pins and needles. The solution to pins and needles, I learned a few years ago, is to directly confront the agony: pull your legs out from underneath you, bend your toes up as high as they can reach, and yes, it will hurt far more initially, but then the pain subsides.
RSS