{"id":881491,"date":"2022-11-13T08:28:51","date_gmt":"2022-11-13T08:28:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newmatilda.com\/?p=132140"},"modified":"2022-11-13T08:28:51","modified_gmt":"2022-11-13T08:28:51","slug":"thanks-to-tom-hanks-and-hollywood-homeless-refugee-dies-a-loveable-inspiring-hero","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2022\/11\/13\/thanks-to-tom-hanks-and-hollywood-homeless-refugee-dies-a-loveable-inspiring-hero\/","title":{"rendered":"Thanks To Tom Hanks And Hollywood, Homeless Refugee Dies A Loveable, Inspiring Hero"},"content":{"rendered":"

News has broken overnight of the death of Iranian asylum seeker Mehran Karimi Nasseri, the real-life inspiration for Steven Spielberg\u2019s 2004 comedy-drama The Terminal<\/em>, starring Tom Hanks who plays a gentle but determined stateless refugee.<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

But the true story of Nasseri’s life is wildly different from that depicted on the big screen, with the homeless, stateless refugee living in limbo for almost two decades, as opposed to the nine months depicted in the film.<\/p>\n

Associated Press reported overnight: \u201cMehran Karimi Nasseri died after a heart attack in the airport\u2019s Terminal 2F around midday, according an official with the Paris airport authority. Police and a medical team treated him but were not able to save him, the official said.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the Hollywood version The Terminal<\/em>, which returned $220 million at the box office, Hanks plays the character of Viktor Navorski, a hapless domestic traveller from Eastern Europe who arrives at New York’s JFK International Airport only to find that an overnight coup d\u2019\u00e9tat in his home country has rendered his passport invalid, and left him stateless.<\/p>\n

\u2018Viktor\u2019 becomes stuck in the JFK terminal, where he lives on a bench in an obscure corner of the airport. In the course of his \u2018adventure\u2019, Viktor falls in love and secures a well-paid job as a painter\/builder, so he has money on which to live.<\/p>\n

Finally, after nine months, Viktor is allowed a brief visit into New York City to honour his late father\u2019s memory (the original purpose of his trip), before flying home.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Tom Hanks, starring in the 2004 film The Terminal, pictured homeless and stateless at JFK International Airport for nine months.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Unfortunately, unlike the film \u2013 which depicted a fictitious nation of Krakozhia\u2013 the real-life \u2018Viktor\u2019 spent 18 years in Charles De Gaul Airport in Paris, living homeless and stateless thanks to the cruelty and bureaucracy of France\u2019s (and broader Europe\u2019s) immigration policies.<\/p>\n

Reports Associated Press: \u201cNasseri was born in 1945 in Soleiman, a part of Iran then under British jurisdiction, to an Iranian father and a British mother. He left Iran to study in England in 1974. When he returned, he said, he was imprisoned for protesting against the shah and expelled without a passport.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe applied for political asylum in several countries in Europe. The UNHCR in Belgium gave him refugee credentials, but he said his briefcase containing the refugee certificate was stolen in a Paris train station.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrench police later arrested him, but couldn\u2019t deport him anywhere because he had no official documents. He ended up at Charles de Gaulle in August 1988 and stayed. Further bureaucratic bungling and increasingly strict European immigration laws kept him in a legal no-man\u2019s land for years.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen he finally received refugee papers, he described his surprise, and his insecurity, about leaving the airport. He reportedly refused to sign them, and ended up staying there several more years until he was hospitalized in 2006, and later lived in a Paris shelter.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ultimately, Nasseri\u2019s experience living rough for nearly two decades left him with precarious mental health, and after being released from the airport he drifted in and out of homelessness.<\/p>\n

\u201cThose who befriended him in the airport said the years of living in the windowless space took a toll on his mental state,\u201d said AP. \u201cThe airport doctor in the 1990s worried about his physical and mental health, and described him as \u2018fossilized here\u2019. A ticket agent friend compared him to a prisoner incapable of \u2018living on the outside\u2019.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the weeks before his death, Nasseri had been again living at Charles de Gaulle, the airport official said.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nasseri\u2019s story didn\u2019t just inspire The Terminal<\/em> starring Hanks, but also a French comedy-drama called Lost in Transit<\/em>, an opera called Flight, <\/em>a mockumentary and a documentary.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

But so inconsequential to all this is the man himself that Nasseri\u2019s first name \u2018Mehran\u2019 was initially misreported by AP as \u2018Merhan\u2019 overnight\u2026 which is how it now appears in media outlets all around the world, including our own ABC.<\/p>\n

Nasseri died at the age of 76. He is not known to have fathered any children, although he did have extended family in Iran and Scotland.<\/p>\n

The post Thanks To Tom Hanks And Hollywood, Homeless Refugee Dies A Loveable, Inspiring Hero<\/a> appeared first on New Matilda<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on New Matilda<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

News has broken overnight of the death of Iranian asylum seeker Mehran Karimi Nasseri, the real-life inspiration for Steven Spielberg\u2019s 2004 comedy-drama The Terminal, starring Tom Hanks who plays a gentle but determined stateless refugee. But the true story of Nasseri\u2019s life is wildly different from that depicted on the big screen, with the homeless, […]<\/p>\n

The post Thanks To Tom Hanks And Hollywood, Homeless Refugee Dies A Loveable, Inspiring Hero<\/a> appeared first on New Matilda<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1258,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[231,1972,54440,54442,5134],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/881491"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1258"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=881491"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/881491\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":881492,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/881491\/revisions\/881492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=881491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=881491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=881491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}