Davar Ardalan - Human Rights Reforms in Iran January 24, 2007

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Complete video at: http://fora.tv/fora/showthread.php?t=570

Iranian-American journalist Davar Ardalan discusses the current state of human rights reform in Iran.

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Davar Ardalan tells her story of love, rejection, and revolution in "My Name is Iran," tracing her personal journey as well as Iran's struggle for a lawful society. A love affair with an Iranian physician took Davar's American grandmother from New York to Iran in 1931. Ardalan herself was born in America and named Iran, after her parents' homeland for which they longed. In 1964, she moved from San Francisco to Solomon's Mosque in a rural part of the country with her Iranian American parents, who barely spoke Farsi. Then her parent's sudden divorce and the cataclysmic events surrounding the 1979 Iranian revolution shattered everything Ardalan had come to hold dear. Once again in the states, she chose to move back to an Islamic Iran. When she arrived, she discovered a world she hardly recognized, and one which demands a near-complete renunciation of the freedoms she experienced in the West. "My Name is Iran" reveals a complicated journey - from a fragile American teenager, to a young bride in the Ayatollah's revolution, to a newscaster in the Islamic Republic, to single motherhood in the US, and finally to a successful NPR producer - and is a remarkable story of a search for self-identity and expression. -- Cody's Books

Davar Ardalan is an award-winning producer for NPRs Morning Edition. In a three-part Morning Edition series produced with American RadioWorks that aired in February 2004, she traced her personal journey as well as Irans struggle for a lawful society, twenty-five years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.