THE GREEN WAVE

In the spring of 2009, Iran wears green: the colour of reform candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, whom above all young people trust to unseat President Ahmadinejad. After the election, Ahmadinejad is declared the winner, Mousavi is placed under house arrest, and hundreds of thousands on the streets of Tehran chant “Where is my vote?” The answer is batons, arrests, gunfire. Ali Samadi Ahadi’s “The Green Wave” (Germany 2010) reconstructs these weeks from blog entries and tweets that become animated scenes, from shaky mobile-phone footage smuggled out of the demonstrations, and from interviews with Iranians in exile, among them the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi.

The animation, in which the bloggers’ voices become figures, gives the anonymous testimony a face without endangering the people behind it; the shift between drawn and filmed reality creates distance from what the images show. The film was shown at Around the World in 14 Films in Berlin in 2010 as the contribution from Iran.

Shown at the 2010 edition of Around the World in 14 Films.

All films 2010 · Film Archive