Grass roots: "The Green Wave"

Aptly, given the title, The Green Wave proves to be a hybrid movie, intended to render the Iranian popular rebellion of summer 2009 - and its subsequent suppression by those loyal to President Ahmadinejad - in terms the rest of the world might best understand: as a comic-book struggle between the forces of good and evil. Writer-director Ali Samadi Ahadi here describes, in roughly chronological order, how the wave of dissent built, peaked and subsided over a matter of months, accelerated as it was by access to social networking sites, yet ultimately crushed in the most ruthless fashion.

The narrative slack is taken up by conventional talking heads (interviews with students, lawyers, clerics, those on the frontlines of this battle), but the green accoutrements so crucial to the rebellion's demonstrations and protests have given Ahadi the idea to intersperse these interviews with animated inserts, visualising the words of those bloggers and Tweeters who gave the movement its global voice. Given the outcome, there's an obvious poignancy to seeing the footage of the May 23rd rally, which did so much to solidify the students' intent to oust Ahmedinejad, and - visually - to reclaim the green in the country's flag. Those interviewed and quoted are particularly attuned to everyday details that weren't reported at the time, such as the minor confusion over voting codes in polling booths that gains in significance as the narrative plays itself out, or what was showing on the state-run TV network on election night.

What follows is, to some degree, already known: the disappointment and anger as the results confirming Ahmedinejad's re-election came in, the shooting of protesters in the street, the arrival of thugs on motorbikes to maim and kill and drag many away for torture. A valuable record (or reminder) of these events, and of the grass-roots spirit that provoked and sustained them, The Green Wave also doubles as a demonstration of the art of the modern documentarist, having to piece together a variety of different media (mobile-phone footage, Tweets, podcasts, news archive) into a coherent whole. The problem the 21st century documentarist faces is not a dearth of material, but an excess (in this instance, everything the bloggers made available online, just for starters), posing the additional problem of having to make the right choices.

Ahadi makes a good deal of these, although the animation remains his film's weakest aspect: falling some way short of the artistry of a Persepolis or the emotional depth of Waltz with Bashir, it seems to be there merely to give us something to look at while the bloggers' words are read out - to distinguish The Green Wave from that wave of transcript-based theatrical experiences seeking to make compelling drama from everyday Iranians' Blogger accounts. Twice, however, the tactic comes good: firstly in an illustration of the imprisonment and torture undergone by one protester, an account of officially unacknowledged activity drawn in expressionistic, Sin City-like penstrokes, and then in a particularly telling anecdote that seems to get to the heart of the rebellion's failure to achieve its immediate aims.

Here, a female blogger tells of the incident when, in the midst of pitched battles, she and a friend observed a young neighbour, seemingly oblivious to the chaos, making his way to a local supermarket in order to buy a tub of yoghurt for himself and his family. Only on the way back from his shopping trip to did the boy encounter any resistance to his movements, being first stopped, and then brutally beaten, by policemen patrolling the area. What the story suggests is that, however widespread the uprising appeared, there were Iranians who weren't on the streets to protest, or communicating with others on Facebook and Twitter, who were, in fact, happily eating dairy products as all hell broke out around them, and it was this key sector of the population the green wave, cresting as it was, simply never got to. It wasn't students the rebels needed to reach out to, but the comfortable middle-classes, not to mention their own militia, those formerly charged with protecting them. Green in this instance was the colour of hope and renewal, but also, we conclude, of naivety.

The Green Wave is in selected cinemas.