Argo offends New Zealanders, too
Thirteen minutes into the Oscarwinning movie Argo, CIA agent Tony Mendezasks supervisor Jack O’Donnell what happened to a group of Americans when the U.S. Embassy was stormed in Tehran.
“The six of them went out a back exit,” O’Donnell tells Mendez, played by Ben Affleck. “Brits turned them away. Kiwis turned them away. Canadians took them in.”
That’s the only mention of New Zealand in Argo, but it is rankling Kiwis five months after the movie was released. Even Parliament has expressed its dismay, passing a motion stating that Affleck, who also directed the film, “saw fit to mislead the world about what actually happened.”
New Zealand joins a list of other countries, including Iran and Canada, that have felt offended by the fictionalized account of how a group of Americans was furtively sheltered and secreted out of Iran during the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
“It’s touched a really raw nerve,” said Steve Matthewman, a sociology professor at the University of Auckland.
The movie’s New Zealand reference may not be totally fair but has an element of truth.
Some in New Zealand have taken those words — “Kiwis turned them away” — as implying the country did nothing to help. Published interviews indicate that diplomats from Britain and New Zealand did help by briefly sheltering the Americans, visiting them and bringing them food, even driving them to the airport when they left.
Yet those interviews also indicate that both countries considered it too risky to shelter the Americans for long. That left the Canadians shouldering the biggest risk by taking them in.