Amanpour gets personal in 'Journey' to native Iran
CNN correspondent 'taking off news hat'
By Phil Kloer
The Atlanta Journal and Constitution
January 24, 2000, Monday
CNN's Christiane Amanpour, who usually guards her personal life, will
take viewers on an unusual tour of her pre-journalistic private life in
Iran in an upcoming CNN special. (Photos with her
husband here)
Amanpour's documentary "Revolutionary Journey," set to air
at 10 p.m.
Sunday, Feb. 27, will follow her back to the house she grew up in Tehran,
once a beautiful home, now terribly run down. Her father and her cousin
also appear in the show.
"For the first time in my career I'm taking off my news hat,"
she said Friday. "I'm taking a personal, intellectual and creative
risk."
Amanpour was raised in Tehran by a British mother and Iranian father
and lived what she has frequently called a privileged life before the Islamic
revolution of 1979. In the documentary, she stands in her old living room
and talks to the camera.
"It was here, 21 years ago," she says, "that my father
was sitting in that corner and I was standing here, and all of a sudden
he said, 'You know, life as we used to know it is going to come to an end,
because the revolution is going to happen and it's just going to be completely
different.' . . . And this is where my life changed."
Amanpour, then 21, moved to London, then became a journalism student
at the University of Rhode Island, and then went to work for CNN in 1983.
She started off fetching coffee for editors and is now the network's chief
international correspondent and the most honored war correspondent of her
generation.
In another scene in the show, Amanpour walks into what used to be her
bedroom and finds it now used for stowing piles of wood. She doesn't
say anything at all, but just walks out of the house.
"I was sad, but I can't really blubber," she said Friday in
a satellite press conference with TV writers.
On the show, meeting her father outside, she asks him about the house.
"It's not a house, it's a ruin," he tells her.
Amanpour, 41, is known as a reporter who rarely inserts herself into
her stories, which have included extensive coverage of the war in the Balkans.
She said "Revolutionary Journey" was her idea and that she
brought it to her superiors at CNN.
Amanpour, who has been in and out of Iran for CNN since 1991, says she
has seen the country recently moving away from strict Islamic fundamentalism.
"The entire political dynamic has changed in Iran. They're trying
to have a proper democracy." The program, she said, is "a documentary
about freedom, and I use my own story to illustrate it." She speaks
with Iranian journalists, politicians and student leaders about the changes
in the country.
Amanpour is pregnant with her first child, due in April.
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