beyondzerosum

Saturday night, we were able to attend another moving movie at The Chicago Human Rights Watch Film Festival: “The Green Wave” about the lead-up to the stolen June 2009 Iranian election and the brutal crackdown that followed. 

The Iranian Green Revolution was in many ways the first modern “technological revolution” because of its innovative use of new age social networking tools like blogs, Facebook, Twitter and cell phones.  This movie reflects this same technology.  Although the film contains some moving interviews of journalists, activists and even a moderate Ayatollah, the bulk of the ‘script’ is taken directly from tweets, blog posts and cell phone conversations.  The images are a mixture of animation (a la that used in the Israeli film, “Waltz with Bashir”), the aforementioned interviews, and most riveting, the use of actual cell phone and other video of the events themselves.  Although the events received pretty wide media coverage at the time, the true scope of both the demonstrations themselves and the brutality of the government crackdown did not really come across on the small screen the it does here.  To underline this point, on one of the demonstration days it is estimated that three million people were in the streets.  This is likely the largest peaceful, public demonstration that has ever occurred in human history.  Anyone interested in trying to understand Iran needs to see this film. 

You can still get a chance to see it on Tuesday, June 7 at 6:30 PM at Facets Multimedia, 1517 Fullerton Ave.,    Info is here.