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.”
During the Metal Ages, prior to the arrival of the Dutch and Chinese, a great shift took place in indigenous material culture. Glass and agate beads, introduced after 400BC, completely replaced Taiwanese nephrite (jade) as the ornamental materials of choice, anthropologist Liu Jiun-Yu (劉俊昱) of the University of Washington wrote in a 2023 article. He added of the island’s modern indigenous peoples: “They are the descendants of prehistoric Formosans but have no nephrite-using cultures.” Moderns squint at that dynamic era of trade and cultural change through the mutually supporting lenses of later settler-colonialism and imperial power, which treated the indigenous as
By 1971, heroin and opium use among US troops fighting in Vietnam had reached epidemic proportions, with 42 percent of American servicemen saying they’d tried opioids at least once and around 20 percent claiming some level of addiction, according to the US Department of Defense. Though heroin use by US troops has been little discussed in the context of Taiwan, these and other drugs — produced in part by rogue Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) armies then in Thailand and Myanmar — also spread to US military bases on the island, where soldiers were often stoned or high. American military policeman
The Venice Film Festival kicked off with the world premiere of Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia Wednesday night on the Lido. The opening ceremony of the festival also saw Francis Ford Coppola presenting filmmaker Werner Herzog with a lifetime achievement prize. The 82nd edition of the glamorous international film festival is playing host to many Hollywood stars, including George Clooney, Julia Roberts and Dwayne Johnson, and famed auteurs, from Guillermo del Toro to Kathryn Bigelow, who all have films debuting over the next 10 days. The conflict in Gaza has also already been an everpresent topic both outside the festival’s walls, where
An attempt to promote friendship between Japan and countries in Africa has transformed into a xenophobic row about migration after inaccurate media reports suggested the scheme would lead to a “flood of immigrants.” The controversy erupted after the Japan International Cooperation Agency, or JICA, said this month it had designated four Japanese cities as “Africa hometowns” for partner countries in Africa: Mozambique, Nigeria, Ghana and Tanzania. The program, announced at the end of an international conference on African development in Yokohama, will involve personnel exchanges and events to foster closer ties between the four regional Japanese cities — Imabari, Kisarazu, Sanjo and