[HN Gopher] Iranian man who lived in Paris' Charles de Gaulle ai...
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Iranian man who lived in Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport for 18
years dies
Author : rntn
Score : 137 points
Date : 2022-11-12 19:37 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| chejazi wrote:
| Earlier Documentary before the Tom Hanks film:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngNP8ZNutNY
| la64710 wrote:
| canadianfella wrote:
| mardifoufs wrote:
| It's an AP news wire. The point is to report about the event,
| not the details or background of the situation
| blamazon wrote:
| A 30 minute documentary from the year 2000 about Sir Alfred is
| available on YouTube:
|
| https://youtu.be/ngNP8ZNutNY
|
| He speaks well in english, smokes an exquisite tobacco pipe
| indoors and you can hear the airport flip boards in the
| background during interviews with him. Also pretty interesting to
| pause and see what's on the newspapers.
| hnthrow10282910 wrote:
| Wow he died in the airport too. Looks like he's been living back
| in the airport for the past few weeks.
| jll29 wrote:
| R.I.P.
|
| According to Wikipedia: "In 1992, a French court ruled that
| having entered the country legally, he could not be expelled from
| the airport, but it could not grant him permission to enter
| France."
|
| A very constructive and humane decision indeed. So this poor chap
| was the living proof of the futility of the court decision.
|
| When speaking positively about some authors that wrote plays in
| the 'theater of the absurd' genre to an actor friend earlier this
| week, he replied that absurd theater was producing the only plays
| realistic enough to confront the modern Kafkaesque society and
| world. Indeed.
| [deleted]
| webwielder2 wrote:
| He eventually came to see the airport as his home, and remained
| even after he was no longer bound there. Atrocity Guide has the
| story https://youtu.be/JQfXd1YlkS4
| sdiq wrote:
| Might probably be corrected but his first name was Mehran rather
| Merhan.
| blamazon wrote:
| I once lived in the CDG airport for 18ish hours and that was
| unpleasant enough. RIP to a true legend.
|
| There's been a Sheraton hotel inside one of the terminals since
| ~1995, hopefully he got a chance to stay there before he died.
| [deleted]
| Aeolun wrote:
| That Sheraton hotel isn't anything to write home about though.
| It may be decent enough for Europe, but any third rate (and 3-4
| times cheaper) hotel in Japan that I've been to has it beaten.
| [deleted]
| blamazon wrote:
| Agreed, but it's absolute paradise when you're stuck in CDG.
| sexangel wrote:
| if he was French or european the 'fair' courts would have
| released him immediately. so much for the law
| tedunangst wrote:
| Yes, I would expect the French courts to allow a French citizen
| to enter France.
| [deleted]
| llanowarelves wrote:
| Yes being a citizen of the country youre in or federated with
| gives you more rights than one you're not of or with.
|
| Should I expect to have the same rights as Iranians, Israelis,
| Chinese, or North Koreans in their own countries?
| klyrs wrote:
| Curiously, he isn't even the record-holder in this regard. A
| related wikipedia page:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_who_have_lived_...
| tedunangst wrote:
| > Wanted to smoke and drink without his family bothering him.
| Also had difficulty finding work. Still lives in the airport,
| but comes out occasionally.
| test1235 wrote:
| How did he afford to live there? Did he get a job in the airport?
| 1123581321 wrote:
| He was given food, and eventually received some donations. His
| expenses were almost non-existent other than that, as he didn't
| pay to sleep there and his lawyer worked pro bono.
| warbler73 wrote:
| This is a really famous case and is fairly Kafkaesque.
|
| It comes down to this:
|
| > In 1992, a French court ruled that having entered the country
| legally, he could not be expelled from the airport, but it
| could not grant him permission to enter France.
|
| He was legally stuck at the airport with no options from 1988
| to 1995 when Belgium said they would take him. After that he
| stayed due to stubbornness in refusing to sign bureaucratic
| papers that did not represent his mental truth, which was
| affected by the years trapped and made him a bit off in the
| head like it would anyone. So he remained stuck.
|
| He never could afford to stay at the airport. He was trapped
| there by bureaucrats. Humanists recognizing his dilemma gave
| him food.
| blondin wrote:
| first time hearing this story.
|
| what a sad one from all sides! we need to do better.
| netsharc wrote:
| Reading his Wikipedia, I wonder if he was of sound mind even
| before being trapped there. Things like his unproven claim of
| being expelled from Iran, "losing" his documents because he
| mailed them to Brussels...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mehran_Karimi_Nasseri
| ryantgtg wrote:
| The above article linked to this, which is pretty great:
| https://www.theguardian.com/film/2004/sep/06/features.featur...
| belter wrote:
| I found this nice enough to be worth of quote here:
|
| "...And yet from the moment I sat down next to him I felt the
| force of his - there is no better word - dignity. Alfred
| seemed totally content within himself. He did not aim to
| please or play on your sympathy. He was not the homeless guy
| on the tube singing for a drink. Everything in Alfred's life
| was conducted on his own terms. In some sense he was a freer
| man than most...
|
| ...Despite outward appearances, Alfred lived a life of total
| self-sufficiency and order. He kept himself meticulously
| clean and groomed, using a nearby airport bathroom. He hung
| his freshly dry-cleaned clothes from the handle of a suitcase
| next to his bench. He always ate a MacDonald's egg and bacon
| croissant for breakfast and a McDonald's fish sandwich for
| dinner. (Perhaps one day McDonald's will have the wit to sign
| Alfred up for a celebrity endorsement.) He always left a tip.
| Alfred was not, to put it bluntly, a bum..."
| pyrale wrote:
| > He was not the homeless guy on the tube singing for a
| drink [...] Alfred was not, to put it bluntly, a bum...
|
| Probably said by someone who laments the era of garden
| hermits.
| blamazon wrote:
| From his Wikipedia article, I imagine this book provided some
| income as well:
|
| > In 2004 Nasseri's autobiography, The Terminal Man,[6] was
| published. It was co-written by Nasseri with British author
| Andrew Donkin and was reviewed in The Sunday Times as being
| "profoundly disturbing and brilliant".[9]
|
| Hopefully he also received some money from the 2004 Tom Hanks
| movie which used an adaptation of his story to earn $219
| million on a budget of $60 million.
|
| For context his primary stay in the airport was until 2006, it
| seems he returned at a later date (recent weeks?)
|
| [9]: https://archive.ph/fYXf0
| mkl95 wrote:
| > His saga inspired The Terminal starring Tom Hanks, and a French
| film.
|
| That's some lazy writing. Whoever wrote it didn't even bother
| googling the French film's name.
| [deleted]
| dylan604 wrote:
| What are you supposed to do if the person you're getting the
| info from didn't put it in their tweet? Clearly my opinion of
| journalism has fallen quite low.
| O__________O wrote:
| For the curious, name of French film and other works inspired
| by Mehran Karimi Nasseri, the Iranian refugee who lived in
| Charles de Gaulle Airport from 1988 to 2006, are listed here:
|
| https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Mehran_Karimi_Nasseri#Documentari...
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(page generated 2022-11-12 23:00 UTC)