Director’s statement: Ali Samadi Ahadi

‘The Green Wave’ er en rørende dokumentar-collage, der illustrerer de dramatiske begivenheder før og efter præsidentvalget i Iran i 2009 og deler følelserne hos de mennesker, der stod bag den historiske grønne revolution. Filmen beskriver deres indledende håb og nysgerrighed, deres desperate frygt og modet til alligevel at fortsætte kampen.

Her fortæller Ali Samadi Ahadi om sine tanker bag filmen.

It was June 12th, 2009. After having worked very hard for two years all of us were
very much looking forward to the premiere of our comedy SALAMI ALEIKUM.
From all over Germany our colleagues gathered together for the International Film
Festival in Emden where the film would be shown to the public for the first time. On
the very same day my wife and I went to Bonn to submit our voting slip for the
presidential elections in Iran. I always felt both, as an Iranian and as a German. So
did my wife. We met in the no man’s land of cultures and tried to bring together in our
lives the positive aspects of both of the two worlds.

On the very same evening of June 12th it suddenly became clear that one of those
worlds was in flames. Despite SALAMI ALEIKUM being a great success in Emden,
our team did not at all feel like celebrating. We felt kind of petrified. Paralyzed. And
this feeling of helplessness was to remain for weeks. Iran was in flames and we
could not do anything. Day by day we were sitting in front of the television for hours,
being on the phone with each other, one in Vienna, the others in Berlin and Cologne.
Silent. We were not in the mood for talking, but then again did not want to be alone
during these hours. We moved together – if only on the phone.

It really took me weeks to get out of this dizziness and to take the decision to do what
I can do best: a film about the events in Iran in the summer of 2009.

But very soon it became clear that we had to find a special narrative style for this,
because for the events behind us there existed only fragmentary poor-quality pictures
taken with cell phones or images from archives covering the situation only in part.
A reenactment was out of question for me, especially since it was clear to me that as
long as the regime in Iran was in power I could no longer visit Iran.

Iran is a nation of bloggers. Thousands of young people write down their feelings,
write down what is on their minds in their blogs. If it was no longer possible for me to
shoot my film in Iran, to interview the people there, these blogs were exactly the right
source to reach the inner voices of the people.

For a long time Ali Soozandeh and I have been searching for an adequate visual
language, when we came across the so-called motion comic to tell about these
blogs. I chose 15 blogs from 1,500 websites which we then translated into images.
We attracted a range of actors like Pegah Ferydoni, Navid Akhavan, Jasmin
Tabatabai and Caroline Schreiber. With them we re-enacted the scenes and took
photos.

Alireza Darvish, a wonderful artist, accepted to do the drawings of the characters,
and Sina Mostafawy and his team began with the animation of the scenes.
Finally, from the archive material, the recently shot interviews, the pictures from cell
phones and the animations, Barbara Toennieshen and Andreas Menn composed this
collage.

The whole production took 10 months. Within these 10 months the concept, the
financing, 42 minutes of animations, the editing as well as the sound design, the
music and the compositing came off.

The time pressure was immense and could only be put up with, because everybody
plunged into the project and worked day and night.

And at the same time one thing was clear for the team of Iranian descent: because of
their participation in this project they will never be able to visit Iran again. But as has
Saadi so nicely said,

Human beings are members of a whole,
In creation of one essence and soul,
If one member is afflicted with pain,
Other members uneasy will remain.
If you’ve no sympathy for human pain,
The name of human you cannot retain!