Ah, here's my taste of current events for the week. First a little history
In 1999 the government of Iran (the religious leaders who really run things) tried an experiement with a moderate government in helping the country recover from the Iran-Iraq war. The imams didn't like the results and quashed the moderate faction, and that led to widespread student protests, arrests, and suppression.
A generation of students later, in 2009, Ahmadinejad was declared the winner of presidential elections. Widespread accusations of election fraud led to the Green Revolution, general protests driven by social media, especially Twitter. The Green Revolution, though it failed, was a precursor to the region-wide Arab Spring a year later. The revolt was eventually put down at least partly through subverting the social media tools themselves, dropping poison pills into the conversation, deliberate misdirection designed to confuse and leach credibility from the movement.
When the film opens we're at the start of the Green Revolution in 2009. At the beginning, there are riots, and people running, and the sounds of gunfire, all brilliantly put together from actual cellphone footage from the time. A bunch of kids (I'm showing my age, these "kids" are 20-25) run into an apartment building to get away from the violence, confusion, and police thugs, and run up the stairs, banging on every door on the way up hoping to find a safe haven, and finally one door opens and they're in Ali's well-appointed upper-middle-class apartment. One of the girls returns the next day for her cellphone and builds a relationship with Ali. And it goes from there.
Thoughts:
But now I have to reconsider my irritation with the young-girl-falls-for-crusty-old-guy trope. Ali was a revolutionary the last time around, back in 1999. He saw it all go bad, became disenchanted with the whole revolution thing, hasn't been out of his apartment in years, and is politically neutered. She's young and beautiful, likes sex, prefers to "sleep in a bed with a man in it," and goes to all the demonstrations with the wide-eyed belief that this time they're going to change things. She brings him out of his shell. Exactly what I was complaining about as a primitive male fantasy in Manglehorn. But this film was written, produced and directed by women. So maybe I can't write off the trop as a shallow male fantasy? Or maybe it's not just a male fantasy, but a female fantasy as well? To find the wise older guy who has the money and wisdom and status and to use your youth and beauty and more grounded woman-energy to heal him? After all, in the stereotype of the silver-haired guy in the Porsche with the young blonde trophy wife, there *are* two parties to that agreement. Hmm.
Also, the filmmaker herself said one of the themes of the film is the relationship between the two generations, the failed revolution of 1999 and the new one going on now. If you tried to sketch out the same plot but reverse the genders, with a young guy coming on to the older woman, you're not going to see the purity of innocence of youth overcoming the tired and jaded detachment of age, you're going to see semi-scary sexual aggression, a young guy manipulating a reclusive woman into sex. The roles aren't reversible.
The film combines scripted scenes with actual cellphone coverage. It's shot entirely within this one apartment (see the neo-Aristotelian "Unity of Place"). But the filmmaker very effectively combines the two to give a sense of space that includes not just the apartment, but the whole city, in fact the whole social world. It's not claustrophobic at all. Though the script would make a good stage play.
Another theme the filmmaker mentioned is that the movie is about how we "live indoors one way and outdoors it's completely different" because of the surveillance of the state, and since the state is really us, the surveillance of us around each other. That person is watching me, are they actually an agent, an informer? Who can you trust? With Twitter and social media like Facebook we're actually volunteering to be surveilled. What does that say about us?
The bad actors in our plot are the basiji. The basiji are paramilitary volunteers, theoretically subservient to the Revolutionary Guards who report to the religious authorities. So for "basiji" think of Hitler's brownshirts, or SA. Or more recently, think of the Ukrainian Berkut, the semi-autonomous police force responsible for beating up protesters in the Maidan. Here in The Red Rose the basiji are the ones breaking up the demonstrations, beating protesters, chasing students through the city in the name of law and protecting the established order, i.e. they're the bastions of conservatism. You know what they made me think of? The pro-gun NRA community in the U.S. There's a whole section of anti-government super-conservative wingnuts who think that stockpiling guns is the way to fend off the overreaching U.S. government. Well when thugs like Nixon get into power and decide they need to make sure they never get kicked out by any so-called "elections", you know who they're going to call to beat up the protesters and to make sure the tree-huggers don't get close to a polling station or a TV camera? Those same pro-gun wingnuts, who have already practically organized themselves into a militia. "I need every God-fearing American who believes in the Constitution to get their gun and come down to City Hall and protect the government you elected to keep you safe." I swear, the basiji, the brownshirts, the John Birch Society, those people are all cut from the same cloth. They're easily manipulated, they revere authority, and in our case they're already armed.
In addition to the filmmaker, Sepideh Farsi, the Q&A session was also attended by a gentleman from the Munk School of Global Affairs, whose name I didn't write down. He brought up a couple things I didn't know. The first is a group called ASL19,
an independent technology and research organization that helps Iranians circumvent internet censorhip and access information online. Based in Toronto, ASL19 was founded in 2011 [Wikipedia]
He said there is a market now for tools for subverting movements via social media. You can actually buy shit to out-Twitter the protesters. How scary is that?
Here's the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-rsmv4aQMM
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