Laura Kim and Paul Federbush of Red Flag Releasing have acquired stateside rights to distribute Sundance documentary collage The Green Wave. Written and directed by Ali Samadi Ahadi and produced by Jan Krueger and Oliver Stoltz, the doc about the 2009 Iran populist protests also screened at the Washington DC, Seattle and Human Rights Watch film festivals. Red Flag will theatrically release the film around the third anniversary of the Iranian elections in June of 2012. The film’s release will include theatrical, OnDemand, DVD, and digital download channels.
The Green Wave documents the brutal attacks by government militia trying to squelch protests that followed the suspicious victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over progressive candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi in the Iranian presidential elections on June 12, 2009. The film tracks internet cell phone videos, blogs, tweets and Facebook posts, and includes animated reenactments –a motion comic– along with interviews with exiled Iranians and human rights advocates. Iranian-born director and author Ali Samadi Ahadi’s documentary serves as a timely chronicle of the ongoing Green Revolution. “It is my hope the film helps create a dialogue about the most important movement for decades in the near and Middle East,” said Ahadi.
Ahadi’s documentary Lost Children, a co-production with Stoltz, won the UNICEF Award and Al Jazeera Awards. Ahadi directed his first feature film Salami Aleikum in 2009.
“This provocative film chronicles the Iranian uprising that was the catalyst for the Arab Spring currently sweeping the region,” said Federbush, who with then-marketing chief Laura Kim shepherded the release of March of the Penguins, Good Night, and Good Luck and Paradise Now at Warner Independent. “It shouldn’t be forgotten.”
Federbush and Kim, who as a marketing consultant worked on the releases of Restrepo and Winter’s Bone, also distributed 8: The Mormon Proposition, which won the 2010 GLAAD Media Award for Best Documentary. RFR’s next release is David Weissman’s Sundance hit, AIDS memoir We Were Here, set to open on September 9, 2011.
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