Academic literature on the topic 'Iranian election protests'

This chapter examines the emergence of what I call ‘internet cinema’ by focusing on Iran in the late 2000s, particularly since the 2009 disputed re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president, which unleashed the opposition Green Movement undergirded by this cinema. Iran provides an example of the use of the new internet-driven digital global media in support of democratic ideals that, soon after the Green Movement, rocked many authoritarian regimes of the Middle East and North Africa.

The book concludes by analyzing the experience of walking through the Cinema Museum in Tehran, the only such museum in Iran. Visitors to the museum are immediately welcomed by a placard that explicitly positions the museum as a reformist effort, and this framing demonstrates that the changes to cinema that we witness during the reformist period were not limited to aesthetics but also included new institutions to support the film industry. Meanwhile, towards the rear of the museum is a large room filled with Iranian film posters, and occupying a central place is Jafar Panahi’s This Is Not a Film (2011). This provocative piece reacts to a twenty-year ban from filmmaking that Panahi received for his participation in the protests following the 2009 Iranian elections. This is Not a Film, which was filmed partially on an iPhone by his former cameraman Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, inverts many of the normative features of filmmaking, and it demonstrates how the cry for reform in the Islamic Republic has deeply impacted filmmaking and refashioned many of its conventions.