Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has revealed how smuggled Netflix shows, contraband Zumba sessions, and homemade pizza helped her endure more than five years in Iran's notorious Evin prison. The British-Iranian former charity worker, speaking at the Big Brue festival in Bruton, Somerset, said she never expected release, so risked her freedom to bring in illegal USB sticks loaded with American television series.
Smuggled TV shows and prison routines
Zaghari-Ratcliffe, detained in 2016, told the audience she and fellow inmates watched "Breaking Bad, Prison Break and Orange is the New Black" on devices she sneaked into the jail. "It was very unusual, but it kind of connected us to the life we had before," she said. "Orange is the New Black is a whole different kind of genre of somebody who's in prison."
The shows, downloaded onto USB sticks, provided a strange comfort. She also organised dance sessions using contraband Zumba videos and cooked pizza for other prisoners in an oven she raised money for and had delivered to the prison. "I was the queen of the pizza dough in prison," she recalled.
Sewing as a lifeline and artistic collaboration
Zaghari-Ratcliffe also secured permission to use the prison sewing machine, which helped her pass the time as she made clothes for her young daughter and fellow inmates. This hobby later led to a collaboration with London's Imperial War Museum and Liberty's fabric department, creating three prints exploring her imprisonment experience.
She described the riskiest contraband item she smuggled in: a Swiss Army knife hidden in her shoe. "It was so chunky, I just couldn't walk," she said. "Having a knife in prison is a real crime. But I felt if they had found it, they would have given me what sentence? I was already in prison, and they couldn't have done anything else to me."
Release and ongoing trauma
Zaghari-Ratcliffe was released in March 2022 after the then Conservative government repaid a multimillion-pound debt the UK owed to Iran. The Iranian regime had accused her of spying—a charge she denied and for which no evidence was ever produced. It became increasingly clear she was held as a state hostage to force the UK to settle the debt from a military deal with the deposed Shah of Iran.
Though still traumatised and seeing a therapist, she finds ongoing solace in sewing. After the military attack on Iran at the end of February, she said: "For five days, I didn't do anything. I just couldn't do anything. The only thing that I could do was sit at my sewing machine and sew." During an internet blackout lasting two months, she added: "I just couldn't control the world around me, but I could control my own world. Sewing was the only thing that could calm me down. So yes, still, that's still my refuge."
