Plot
Brian Keenan, a humourless bearded Irish academic, has moved to Beirut in the mid 1980s and works as an English teacher. As he leaves for work one day, four armed men in a car kidnap him and he is incarcerated. Keenan wakes up, almost naked, alone in an iron-clad room. Initially he refuses to eat until he is told why he is being held prisoner. He is kept on his own but eventually he is moved into a cell in a deserted house, where he is joined by another hostage, the English journalist John McCarthy, who had been reporting on Keenan’s kidnapping not long before he himself was abducted. The grumpy Brit-hating Irishman and the more pliable British journalist are forced to share their small prison cell.
Keenan refuses to be shaved or wear clean clothes until he gets answers from his captors. He protests about having his beard shaved off. A grumpy idealist, Keenan sees his treatment by his Muslim jailers as equaling the British historic treatment of Ireland. McCarthy is neutral and pragmatic. The two men are periodically moved around to new hiding places. The pair slowly begin to bond as they make a temporary life together, playing chess, catching mosquitoes, trapping a mouse, telling stories and imagining they are somewhere else. They become very close friends and when one man is in trouble or close to the breaking point, the other invariably helps him.
Their guards treat them with a mixture of detachment, kindness and cruelty. After another move, to a small, white-tiled cell, McCarthy is traumatized after being shown a video of his mother pleading for his return. He finds strength in Keenan's own brand of self-control.
The two men are smuggled to a house in the countryside. Keenan attacks a young guard who is trying to humiliate him by making him open and close a window repeatedly. He is beaten. McCarthy intercedes with the leader of the captors saying this should not have been allowed to happen. He too is beaten. Eventually in 1990 after more than four years of imprisonment, Keenan is released. He is reluctant to accept his freedom if it means leaving McCarthy behind. Back in Ireland a year later, Keenan receives a call in a pub: McCarthy is to be released. He is waiting at the airport for McCarthy to arrive home.
Sir Terence Hardy Waite is an English humanitarian and author.
John Patrick McCarthy is a British journalist, writer and broadcaster, and one of the hostages in the Lebanon hostage crisis. McCarthy was the United Kingdom's longest-held hostage in Lebanon, where he was a prisoner for more than five years.
Brian Keenan is a Northern Irish writer whose work includes the book An Evil Cradling, an account of the four and a half years he spent as a hostage in Beirut, Lebanon from 11 April 1986 to 24 August 1990.
Ian Davies, better known by his stage name Ian Hart, is an English actor. His most notable roles have been in One Summer (1983), Backbeat (1994), Land and Freedom and Nothing Personal (1995), Michael Collins (1996), Liam (2000), as Professor Quirrell in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001), as Ludwig van Beethoven in Eroica (2003), My Mad Fat Diary (2013–2015), as Father Beocca in The Last Kingdom (2015–2020), and The Responder (2022).
Members of the Iraqi insurgency began taking foreign hostages in Iraq beginning in April 2004. Since then, in a dramatic instance of Islamist kidnapping they have taken captive more than 200 foreigners and thousands of Iraqis; among them, dozens of hostages were killed and others rescued or freed. In 2004, executions of captives were often filmed, and many were beheaded. However, the number of the recorded killings decreased significantly. Many hostages remain missing with no clue as to their whereabouts. The United States Department of State Hostage Working Group was organized by the U.S. Embassy, Baghdad, in the summer of 2004 to monitor foreign hostages in Iraq.
Keenan is an Irish surname meaning 'ancient, distant' in the Irish language. It is derived from ÓCianáin 'descendant of Cianán'. The Ó Cianáin clan were hereditary historians to the Mac Uidhir.
Jill Morrell is a British charity worker and former journalist. She came to the public eye following the kidnapping of her boyfriend John McCarthy, in 1986. Morrell was a tireless and effective campaigner for McCarthy's release from captors who held him in Lebanon for more than 5 years.
Alexandra Rousseau is a fictional character on the ABC television series Lost played by Tania Raymonde. She was born 16 years prior to the crash of Oceanic Flight 815, but was taken from her mother, Danielle Rousseau, by Ben Linus. She was raised among them, believing her mother to be dead. She has helped the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 on many occasions, and is reunited with her mother at the end of the third season. Not long after however, she is shot and killed by Keamy after her adoptive father, Ben, would not listen to his demands. Her death scene was received positively by critics, earning it a spot on multiple "top moments of the season" lists.
RFK is a 2002 American historical drama television film directed by Robert Dornhelm and written by Hank Steinberg. The film stars Linus Roache as Robert F. Kennedy. David Paymer, Martin Donovan, Jacob Vargas, Marnie McPhail, Sergio Di Zio, Sean Sullivan, Ving Rhames and James Cromwell also star. It premiered on the FX Network on August 25, 2002.
The Lebanon hostage crisis was the kidnapping in Lebanon of 104 foreign hostages between 1982 and 1992, when the Lebanese Civil War was at its height. The hostages were mostly Americans and Western Europeans, but 21 national origins were represented. At least eight hostages died in captivity; some were murdered, while others died from lack of adequate medical attention to illnesses. During the fifteen years of the Lebanese civil war an estimated 17,000 people disappeared after being abducted.
Jackie Mann, was a Royal Air Force fighter pilot in the Battle of Britain, who in later life was kidnapped by Islamists in Lebanon in May 1989 and held hostage for more than two years.
Best is a 2000 British film portraying the football career of the Northern Irish soccer star George Best, particularly his years spent at Manchester United. It was directed by Mary McGuckian.
The kidnapping of Sharon Commins and Hilda Kawuki was an international hostage crisis which lasted from 3 July until 18 October 2009. Sharon Commins, an aid worker from Clontarf, Dublin, Ireland, and Hilda Kawuki, a Ugandan colleague, were abducted from a compound run by the GOAL aid agency in north Darfur, Sudan. They were thought to have been abducted by the Janjaweed.
Anthony Grey is a British journalist and author. While working for Reuters, he was imprisoned by the Chinese government for 27 months from 1967 to 1969. He has written a series of historical novels and non-fiction books, including several relating to his detention.
Thomas Niedermayer, OBE (1928–1973) was a German industrialist, who was kidnapped by and died while in the hands of the Provisional IRA in 1973. He was the managing director of the Grundig factory in Belfast, and the West German honorary consul for Northern Ireland.
John Henry Cantlie was a British war photographer and correspondent. He was kidnapped in Syria with James Foley in November 2012. He had previously been kidnapped in Syria alongside Dutch photographer Jeroen Oerlemans in July 2012, but was rescued a week later. In July 2017, reports surfaced in Iraqi media claiming Cantlie had been killed in an airstrike sometime during the battle of Mosul. In October 2017, a French ISIS fighter told French magazine Paris Match that he had seen Cantlie "seven or eight months ago" in Raqqa. In January 2019, an official of the Syrian Democratic Forces stated Cantlie may still be alive inside Deir ez-Zor Governorate, Syria.
James Wright Foley was an American journalist and video reporter. While working as a freelance war correspondent during the Syrian Civil War, he was abducted on November 22, 2012, in northwestern Syria. He was murdered by decapitation in August 2014 purportedly as a response to American airstrikes in Iraq, thus becoming the first American citizen killed by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
Peter Edward Kassig, also known as Abdul-Rahman Kassig, was an American aid worker who was beheaded by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
Some Other Rainbow is a joint memoir written by John McCarthy and Jill Morrell and first published by Bantam Press in 1993. It deals in separate chapters with the individual and parallel experiences of McCarthy and Morrell, during McCarthy's captivity in the Lebanon, which lasted from 17 April 1986 until 8 August 1991.
Hostages is a 1992 American drama film directed by David Wheatley and written by Bernard MacLaverty. The film stars Kathy Bates, Colin Firth, Ciarán Hinds, Natasha Richardson, Jay O. Sanders, Josef Sommer and Harry Dean Stanton. The film premiered in the United Kingdom on ITV on September 23, 1992, and in the United States on HBO on February 20, 1993.
