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Bring Them Home

Directors

Ray Whitehouse, Kate Woodsome

Producers

Ray Whitehouse, Kate Woodsome

Editors

Katrina De Vera

Cinematographers

Ray Whitehouse

Americans Emad and Bahareh Shargi never expected their family to be torn apart by the global effort to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon. But while visiting the country of their birth, Iranian security forces took Emad hostage as a pawn in the proliferation talks. Bahareh and her daughters are now forced into unlikely roles, navigating Iran’s shadowy authoritarian system — and complex U.S. diplomatic and domestic politics — to try to free Emad. With more Americans now held hostage by foreign governments than by terrorist groups, Bring Them Home is an intimate window into a fast-shifting geopolitical landscape.

Kate Woodsome

Kate Woodsome

Co-Director, Bring Them Home

Kate Woodsome is a writer, producer and director at Washington Post Opinions. Her work explores the motives for — and impacts of — inequity, abuse of power and social division. She was part of the team that won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of the Jan. 6 insurrection. Kate is now focusing on America’s mental health crisis and the need for collective care. A Murrow Award-winning journalist, she chooses her medium, be it written column or short documentary, based on what the story and its subjects demand. She built Washington Post Opinions’ Video Department from the ground up and in the past year, her films “Bring Them Home” (director/producer) and “Fight or Flight” (consulting producer) screened at the Big Sky Film Festival and DOC NYC. Kate previously managed a live global affairs program at Al Jazeera English and spent her early career as a print and radio reporter in Cambodia, Cuba and Hong Kong.
Honors and Awards: National Press Photographers Association’s Best of Photojournalism, 2023 ; Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, 2022; Ben Bradlee Award for Courage in Journalism, 2022; Edward R. Murrow Award, 2021 ; White House News Photographers Association’s Eyes of History, 2021, 2022; National Association of Black Journalists’ Salute to Excellence, 2018.

Ray Whitehouse

Ray Whitehouse

Co-Director, Bring Them Home

Ray Whitehouse (he/him) works at the intersection of documentary film and journalism. After growing up in Chicago, he lived in San Antonio, Texas, before moving to Washington, D.C. He works primarily as a director of photography.

His feature-length directorial debut, A RUN FOR MORE, had its world premiere at Frameline in June 2022 and screened more than 30 festivals across the U.S.

He served as the Second Unit DP on TO THE END, directed by Rachel Lears, which premiered at Sundance in 2022. BRING THEM HOME, a documentary short he co-directed and DP’d, premiered at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in 2022.

He was part of the Washington Post team that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for reporting about the Capitol insurrection and its aftermath.

He’s worked as a cinematographer on more than 20 documentary features and filmed, produced and edited projects for The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, and Univision, among others.

He is community coordinator for the D.C. chapter of Video Consortium and a regional co-chair of the Documentary Producers Alliance. He holds an M.A. in documentary journalism from UNC Chapel Hill and a B.S. in journalism from Northwestern University. The core tenets of his practice are transparency, collaboration and critical reflexivity.