Inside Iran, 100k subscribers on YouTube, and what's coming Thursday
The World According to Zandland - Issue #28
I’m kind of on holiday this week (can you ever really be when you run a business?) so this one is short. But too much has happened to skip it entirely.
On Sunday night, Inside Iran: War & Revolution was released on ITV1 in the UK, and on our YouTube internationally. A film made with Iranian journalists who risked everything to tell the story of their country’s brutal year, entirely through the voices of people actually living it with footage filmed entirely on the ground, as it happened, in Iran.
The response has been pretty incredible. The film was Pick of the Day in the Sunday Times, the Observer, the Weekend i and the Times, with picks in the Daily Mail, the Sun and the Daily Telegraph too. The words use to describe it were: “extraordinary”. “Unmissable”. “Harrowing”. The Times also ran a column off the back of it, on how the regime’s brutality risks turning Iran’s mothers into revolutionaries.
I also wrote a long piece in the Observer about the people in the film and why we made it. As a British-Iranian, this story was personal to me in a way few others are. One line from a contributor has stayed with everyone who watched the film… “It feels like being inside your own house with your child’s killer, while a pack of wolves circles outside.”
The full film is out now on our YouTube channel… If you’re in the UK, it’s on ITVX.
The strange thing about this film is that the people who most deserve credit for it can’t receive any. Their names have to stay hidden, for their own safety from the Iranian government. So thank you to everyone who watched. But mostly, thank you to the people you’ll never know made it.
Some other milestones too as last week was a big one for us, on Saturday we passed 100,000 subscribers on YouTube, in just around ten months. Not bad! And the content keeps growing, with millions of viewers now watching every month. Whether you’ve been here since the first film or arrived last week, thank you. I’m honestly very grateful we now have, Zandlanders. My dream of creating an entire country is getting realer by the week.
And for the Zandland die-hards: everything we make now lives in one place on our website zand.land. Inside Iran, Breaking Ranks, The Cult of NatureBoy, all the Human films. So bookmark our website and you’ll never miss a film of ours again.
One more thing before I go back to pretending I’m on holiday but actually instead watching cuts of the next thing I’m about to tell you: this Thursday we release our next documentary, looking inside the world of guns in America. More on that soon.
Thanks for reading.
Ben