The Green Wave

The Hollywood Reporter

PARK CITY -- (World Cinema) "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 has 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.