This is not a Film

The protests over the 2009 elections in Iran were a CIA plot aimed at starting another "color revolution". Mousavi hadn't held office in ten years, he suddenly decided to run for president three months before the election, he barely campaigned and only in two cities, then he declared himself the winner before the polls had even closed and called on his supporters to take to the streets.The election results were perfectly in line with the credible polls taken before the election.

I'm not terribly sympathetic to Jafar Panahi, the subject of the documentary, This Is Not A Film. He was a CIA stooge, planning to make a movie supporting Mousavi.

The movie starts with him in his very nice apartment. He talks on the phone to his lawyer who was appealing his sentence----six years in prison and a 20 year ban from working in the movies. She thought she could knock both down quite a bit.

The movie looked beautiful. Seemed to be filmed in existing light on a prosumer camcorder with some lousy-looking additional footage shot on a cell phone.

Panahi wants to act out the script he wrote for an earlier movie that was rejected by censors. He puts some masking tape down on the floor to represent the set, sort of like the "sets" in Lars von Trier's Dogville. It's not working and Panahi gives up.

If you can tell a film, why make a film, he says.

He probably could have talked about it at length without actually acting out the movie for the camera. It seems like there are ways to do it. It's like writing a movie review without discussing the plot. It can be done.

Well, good luck to him.