Pizza dough and TV prison dramas: how Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe survived jail in Iran

It is a TV show about women confined to prison in the US, but Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe found watching Orange is the New Black with her fellow inmates a strange comfort after smuggling episodes into her Iranian jail cell, downloaded on to an illegal USB stick.

The British-Iranian former charity worker was detained in 2016 for more than five years and kept in the notorious Evin prison in Tehran.

She told an audience at the Big Brue festival in Bruton, Somerset, that she thought she would never be released, so did not mind risking her freedom by sneaking in contraband.

This included USB sticks preloaded with Netflix shows. She said: “We watched Breaking Bad, Prison Break and Orange is the New Black. It was very unusual, but it kind of connected us to the life we had before. Orange is the New Black is a whole different kind of genre of somebody who’s in prison.”

Zaghari-Ratcliffe also danced with her fellow prisoners to contraband Zumba videos and cooked pizza for them in an oven she managed to cobble together money for and have sent to the prison. “I was the queen of the pizza dough in prison,” she said.

She also discussed how she got permission to use the prison sewing machine, which helped her pass the time as she sewed clothes for her young daughter and her friends, the other prisoners.

This newfound artistic hobby spawned a collaboration with London’s Imperial War Museum and the fabric department of Liberty, creating three new prints that explored her experience as a prisoner.

The riskiest item of contraband she snuck into prison was a Swiss Army knife. She said: “I realised, they don’t care what I do. I’m just a political hostage. So I can basically do anything in prison. I can be naughty. I can smuggle things, and once I smuggled this massive whopping Swiss knife.”

She placed it in her shoe, but said: “It was so chunky, I just couldn’t walk. 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.”

Zaghari-Ratcliffe was released in March 2022 after the then Conservative government paid back a multimillion 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 being held as a state hostage to try to force the UK to pay back its debt arising from a military deal struck with the deposed Shah of Iran.

Though she is still traumatised by her time in prison and is visiting a therapist, Zaghari-Ratcliffe said she had continued to find solace in sewing.

“When the military attack on Iran happened at the end of February, 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,” she said.

“I thought, I don’t even know where my parents are. There was an internet blackout for a good two months, and 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.”