This film, starring Richard Roxburgh, is drawn from Peter Greste’s memoir The First Casualty about his imprisonment for over 400 days in an Egyptian prison after his arrest while covering the unrest in Cairo after the overthrow of President Mohamad Morsi. He is bewildered by the whole process, and sure at first that a mistake has been made until the truth of the gravity of his situation seeps in. He is warned by another political prisoner that, in order to survive, he would need to learn to live with himself. He learns this for himself, as he has to face the fact that his own journalistic derring-do had led to the death of BBC journalist Kate Peyton, while they were chasing a story in Mogadishu in Somalia in 2005. I’m not really sure whether Kate’s death eight years earlier really had the centrality for Greste that is shown in this film, although he was a consultant on this film so he must have been comfortable with it. Certainly the Australian embassy doesn’t come out too well, and the film is a strong critique of what passes for ‘justice’ in Egypt and the impotence of foreign governments to help. The real life Peter Greste himself appears from the outside to be a fairly stoic sort of person, and I felt that Roxburgh didn’t really have a lot to work with here.
My rating: 3 stars out of 5
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 