Adnkronos, an Italian press agency that specializes in English-language news from the Arab world, is reporting today that Persepolis creator/co-director Marjane Satrapi and her fellow Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf (probably best known here for his 2001 film Kandahar) “presented a document to Green Party MPs in the European parliament claiming to show that defeated presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi had received over 19 million votes in the weekend election.” The document, purportedly from the Iranian Electoral Commission, also claims that standing president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came in third place with just 12 percent of the national vote.
Makhmalbaf is closely aligned with Mousavi, and has been extremely vocal in the days since the election results were announced in Ahmadinejad’s favor, saying that Mousavi has asked him “to warn the world that this is a coup d’etat, and Mousavi has asked for the world’s governments not to recognise a president created by a coup.” As a result, Makhmalbaf’s own website has been the target of a number of cyber attacks (hence, I’ll refrain from linking to it).
David Hudson has an extensive round-up of other film-related Iran links. The Adnkronos story came to me via Gina Telaroli’s Twitter.
The story notes that “there is no certainty about the legitimacy of the document,” and frankly, if I heard a website was reporting that two art filmmakers were claiming to have inside evidence on a major instance of election fraud in America, I was would assume it was The Onion. That said, we don’t have a lot of homegrown filmmakers with Makhmalbaf’s connections to a candidate, and this is certainly not the least plausible thing I’ve heard in connection to the Iran Election over the past few days.
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth