Letters from Iran

When a girl named Neda was murdered on the street during the student protests in Iran in 2009, images of her were transmitted all around the world. Since then, Western media access to the country has been very limited. The French filmmaker Manon Loizeau has attempted to reconstruct the protest, and for the last two years she has been following a group of Iranians living outside their homeland. She put together excerpts of archive footage, leaked YouTube clips, and amateur recordings of demonstrations to create an impression of the failed Green Revolution. We see jerky images of emotional protest meetings, harrowing interviews with dissidents who have fled the country after the torture they suffered, and unique material showing the nerve-wracking cat-and-mouse game with the regime. The students' zeal breeds hope. Take, for example, the young Majid, who was arrested while dressed as a woman in a headscarf. The government disseminated photos of him to humiliate him, but soon afterwards hundreds of Iranian men placed photos online of themselves in headscarves in a show of solidarity. Another fascinating scene was shot by an Iranian woman in a beauty salon, where the political situation is discussed behind drawn drapes. The secretly filmed footage of violent attempts to suppress the protest is of course low in audiovisual quality, but no less impressive for that.