'Green Wave' fails to advance Iran conversation

"The Green Wave," a
documentary about the "Green" explosion following the 2009
presidential election in Iran and the government's violent
response, is intriguing but for the wrong reasons.
The film's Iranian writer-director Ali Samadi Ahadi lives in
Germany and the Western media have been tossed out by Iran's
hard-line Islamic regime so the film is constructed not out of
the news footage and on-the-spot reporting but rather through
animation, video posts, Facebook and Twitter messages.
It's a scrappy, highly adventurous approach that for the most
part works well. What is disappointing is how little new
information there is here for anyone who has followed news
reports and, yes, various social networks in 2009. The movie is
more an illustration of what you already knew about the
groundswell of support garnered by presidential candidate
Mir-Hossein Mousaviand the increasingly repressive dictatorship
of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The film is certain to get considerable festival play,
especially now that festival directors realize there is little
risk in offending the Iranian government, which has severely
cracked down on its own once thriving cinema. "The Green Wave"
may then see minor exposure in European specialty venues but is
most likely to play on European cable.
Indeed toward the end, the film directly addresses Western
European countries that while protesting Iran's nuclear program
have turned a blind eye to its appalling abuse of its own
citizens. A number of Iranian dissidents interviewed here accuse
those nations of signing treaty after treaty with the
blood-drenched regime to safeguard their own business interests.
Ahadi used a thousand entries in Iranian blogs two create two
fictional students, whose hopes, fears and experiences with
terror at the hands of government security thugs filter through
the movie. Poor quality videos from YouTube and the like give the
movie its crowd scenes and sequences of brutal violence.
Then interviews with the likes of Nobel laureate Dr. Shirin
Ebadi, Shiite cleric Dr. Mohsen and former UN war crimes
prosecutor Dr. Payam Akhavan fill in the political details and
lay out a range of charges against a regime that had to steal an
election to retain power.
Both old and new media have already transformed much if not
all of these details into the public domain. The creation of
fictional characters through blogs brings you super-charged
experiences but without any sense of a real person undergoing
these ordeals. And the animation, while exceedingly well drawn,
is cheaply put together giving the film a stilted feeling.
Increasingly, animation has proven an effective means of
conveying war and social unrest especially where cameras cannot
go in films such as Persepolis, also about Iran, and Waltz With
Bashir, also about the Middle East. What is best about The Green
Wave is how it offers yet another avenue for animators to take
where even intrepid documentarians cannot tread.