When the freelance journalist Theo Padnos was released on Aug. 24, 2014 from nearly two years in captivity as a hostage of Jabhat al-Nusra, an arm of Al Qaeda in Syria, he had endured torture, isolation and the continual uncertainty of whether he would live until the next day.
Padnos, who spent part of his childhood in Woodstock, was released to United Nations peacekeepers in the Golan Heights, the disputed territory between Israel and Syria.
This came after months of effort by Padnos’ extended family, the publisher of The Atlantic magazine, and diplomats in the U.S., Europe and Qatar, which has negotiated the release of other hostages, to get him out in the face of overwhelming odds.
On Saturday, Nov. 5, a documentary about Padnos’ ordeal and subsequent freedom Theo Who Lived will be screened at the Loew Auditorium in the Black Family Visual Arts Center at Dartmouth College.
Padnos, director David Schisgall and producer Amanda Branson Gill (a cousin of Padnos who lives part of the year in Peacham, Vt.) will be at the Loew for a post-screening discussion.
The documentary also focuses on Padnos’ mother, Nancy Curtis, who divides her time between Cambridge, Mass., and Woodstock, and one of his cousins Viva Hardigg, a former reporter for U.S. News and World Report who graduated from Dartmouth, and now lives in Hanover.
Hardigg and Curtis were two of four women in the Curtis and Padnos families who fought on Padnos’ behalf by talking to anybody and everybody they thought could be helpful in securing his freedom.
“What became clear to us early on was that if we were passive, even for a moment, we had virtually no chance of getting him back. From the outset we knew the chances were slim but if it were to work it would require constant vigilance,” Hardigg said in a phone interview.
The documentary takes a somewhat unconventional route. It’s not a standard talking-heads documentary, with explanations from outside experts and a third-person narration.
Instead, Padnos tells his own story, by going back to the Turkish town on the Syrian border where he was kidnapped after meeting with some young men who told him they could smuggle him into Syria. The young men, it turned out, were working with Jabhat Al-Nusra.
Padnos was 44 at the time, spoke fluent Arabic, had written a book about Islam called Undercover Muslim, and had spent time in the Middle East. After the book came out, he’d changed his professional name from Padnos, his father’s surname, to Curtis, his mother’s name, so he could continue to travel with ease throughout the Middle East, according to an article on the hostage families by Lawrence Wright in The New Yorker.
This gave him more background than some other freelance journalists who went into Syria with precious little experience, and no backing from the big news organizations that could give them some measure of protection. Even so, Padnos concedes in the documentary that he took the kind of risks that led to his kidnapping.
In the film Padnos retraces his steps from Turkey to Syria, and describes both his captivity and his relationship with his captors, a group of men who rotated over time.
Some of the men who held him showed flashes of humanity; others were brutal beyond human imagining; the last Al Qaeda leader with whom Padnos traveled confided in him about his fears for the future; there was a certain mordant humor to their conversations. Padnos said that if he had been taken by ISIS, rather than Al Qaeda, he would likely not have survived.
Indeed, his freedom came on the heels of the murder of American journalist James Foley, who had been decapitated by an ISIS executioner less than a week before Padnos was set free.
Padnos’ capacity for survival, even though there were numerous moments when he feared that death was imminent, was due, in some part, to his ability to talk to people, and to make those connections, no matter how small or ephemeral they might have seemed at the time.
“In that kind of environment you’re dependent on people for every little crust of bread, so you establish relationships because you don’t know where your next crust of bread is coming from,” Padnos said in a phone interview from New York.
He is now based in Paris, to be closer to his father who lives there, and travels between France and Vermont.
In the film Padnos also recreates some of the scenes of his captivity, and torture, on sets that were built to simulate the places in which he was imprisoned.
Padnos said that he would be interested, at some point, in revisiting the actual locations where he was held. He had spent months in captivity trying to figure out where he was, and after he was back in the West he looked up some of the locations on Google Maps.
“They had a lot of power over me at one point. I’d like to be more in control in those places and own that environment in a way I never did. I never saw the outside of some of those buildings. I’d like to see where they are situated,” Padnos said.
Hardigg recalled the high tension of the night before her cousin’s release.
“Samantha Power (the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N.) called me the day before and said, we think tomorrow is the day. There was no sleep that night, waiting for the next dispatch. Until we had confirmation we knew even within the last moments we knew he could be killed, even within sight of the border.”
The objective was always clear for Hardigg, Curtis and the other women. But there were moments of profound despair: a false report that Padnos was dead, the murder of Foley.
The trick, Hardigg said, was to tell herself: “I will keep approaching this problem from every angle I can absolutely think of, and I’m not doing it alone. When you’re pleading for someone’s life you find you can boldly ask for things that you didn’t think it would be possible to do.”
What has struck her, she said, is that Padnos shows no outward resentment.
“He’s so cognizant of all the people that are there who are still suffering, people trying to escape this terrible conflict. I’m so struck by his resilience and lack of bitterness,” she said. “He wants understanding. That, to me, is a tremendous takeaway.”
Padnos wrote an account of his imprisonment for the New York Times magazine in October 2014. He is now writing a play about his experiences, and has already written a novel, which he started during his captivity.
He still corresponds, he said, with some of his captors.
“I’m in touch with them. I’m interested in what they’re up to. Some want to leave jihad, some want to carry on, some are ambivalent. They’re in a desperate warfare situation, and the cause is looking less and less good.
“Maybe this caliphate,” Padnos said, paraphrasing a sentiment of some of his former captors, “wasn’t such a good idea.”
Theo Who Lived screens at 7 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 5 at the Loew Auditorium in the Black Family Visual Arts Center at Dartmouth College. For information and tickets go to hop.dartmouth.edu/Online/hopfilmtheowholived or call the Box Office at 603-646-2422.
If you missed her visit to Rivendell Academy this week, Northeast Kingdom filmmaker Bess O’Brien will screen All of Me, her new documentary about people struggling with eating disorders and body-image issues, at two more Upper Valley venues this weekend. Each screening starts at 7 at night: tonight at Springfield Cinemas 3 in Springfield, Vt., and Sunday at Tracy Hall in Norwich. O’Brien’s previous documentary, The Hungry Heart, won awards for its depiction of opiate addiction in Vermont. Admission is $12 at the door. To watch a trailer of the movie and learn more, visit kingdomcountyproductions.org.
Also at Dartmouth: Just in time for Halloween, the Hopkins Center and CATV (Cable Access TV) in White River Junction roll out the red carpet for local, young filmmakers. The occasion? The fifth annual Halloween-o-thon, where young, local filmmakers get to show their five-minute horror movies from the recent contest for local filmmakers. They screen at 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. in the Loew Auditorium. This is the third year that the films have been shown in Loew.
“Everybody loves to make movies,” said Sydney Stowe, acting director of Film at the Hopkins Center. “This is a forum for them and all their creativity, and it removes that Dartmouth barrier.”
Other activities include workshops that Dartmouth film students will conduct for young moviemakers. Admission is free. To learn more, visit hop.dartmouth.edu or call 603-646-2422.
The Hanover Conservancy screens The Messenger, a documentary about the connection between wild birds and humans, on Nov. 5 at 11 a.m. at the Nugget Theatre in Hanover. Admission is $5 for members of the conservancy and $8 for others. To learn more, visit hanoverconservancy.org
Nicola Smith can be reached at nsmith@vnews.com.