The Green Wave is a shocking documentary film combining pieces of video and textual footage about about the civilian movement of the Iranian presidential election in 2009. The film includes interviews of several bloggers, and also the Iranian Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi gives criticizing comments on the election fraud.
In the film, a layer of animation is used to tie the narrative of bloggers to the actual video footage from demonstrations. It is a nice trick that makes the film look better on screen even though the most of the shown footage is actually taken with a mobile phone camera and thus is of low quality. The style of animation reminds me of Persepolis, an animation film (2007) that takes place around the Islamic revolution of Iran (definitely worth watching for a viewer interested in modern history of Iran).
The documentary cannot avoid sentimentality, as some scenes are very violent and make the viewer feel very bad. The film is not actually very political: It does not attempt to explain the real differences between the ideologies of the presidential candidates Ahmadinejad and Mousavi. Instead, it shows cruelties of the regime, and how it suppresses the voice of young and educated voters who want change.
The Green Wave is a documentary that does not look very far behind in time. It is actually telling about an uprising that is still, to some extent, going on, and nobody yet knows the final outcome of the series of events. Thus, it is a product of its time, and may not hold time very well. The main rationale for showing this film to people around the world is to inform them about the injustice in present-day Iran.
As a background, I recommend the excellent three-part documentary series "Iran and the West" from BBC (2009). It describes the evolution of Iran from the era of Shahs until the time before the latest controversial election.
