The last time I saw a documentary I'd classify as a horror film in disguise, it was Stefan Forbes' Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story. Similarly, Petr Lom's Letters to the President concerns itself with a man who is trying to convince everyone he's not so bad: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Whereas Forbes' film finds Atwater gradually humanized, Letters makes you really wonder what anyone (Sean Penn of all people) could possibly find humane or redeeming at all in the Ahmadinejad regime.
Iranian President Ahmadinejad mobbed by the desperate
The title of the film refers to Ahmadinejad urging all the proles to send him letters telling about their problems so that he can fix them. The film begins with Iranians approaching the documentarians at more than arm's length, saying "everything is perfect, everyone is happy, healthy, and well-fed." All of them seem to know or be related to someone who the President has "helped."
Lom's film is the perfect indictment of "faith-based" government, even though it was made with Ahmadinejad's unconditional blessing. There are plenty of promises made and broken, but no one accepting responsibility for them. Those who come out openly criticizing Ahmadinejad all seem rather resigned to the fact it could only be worse with someone else, as it was with his predecessors.
This is a great pre-emptive look at what life is like in Iran for those who think we need to just go in, guns a-blazin'. I'm not talking about the people who just think the entire Middle East should be wiped away in a bath of flames, but those who think that's how you affect positive change. It's a more complex situation than that, and if anything, the bungling of Iraq has finally gotten it through a bunch of W voters.
The thing that struck me as the son of a Cuban expatriate was how many of these people were opening themselves and their families up for retaliation. If anything was missing from the film for me, it was any indication of what happens to someone who speaks out. The Ahmadinejadistas don't seem like the Freedom of Speech type from everything I've seen. A number of interview subjects inferred a fear of reprisal in the words they were carefully choosing coupled with the terror in their eyes.
A building facade depicting Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeni aka Big Habibbi. The painting was completed by men featured in the film
On election day, you hear someone espouse a different political view than what the ballot in his hand reflects, and you worry about him and the kid he cradles in his arms. I want to know where some of these people are a couple years later. If Lom can capture that, then he's doing better humanitarian work than the professionals.
During the SXSW screening that my cohort Gy caught, he was shocked at the amount of laughter from the audience, to the point that he wondered if they thought it was all a put-on. I told him I figured the laughter came from a place of discomfort. As Ebert has said, "they laugh, that they may not cry."
Most modern American audiences are allergic to the truth. They don't want to look outside the window. They want to stare at their myriad screens and dial up on-demand comfort programming. Standing up and doing something for themselves or the world around them has to meet the "hipness" quotient, or they tune out. There must be merchandising involved, or it gets too real and they freak out.
I'll be in touch with the director for an interview soon, wherein I'll check on distribution plans. In an ideal world, there would be an ad-supported, streaming version of the film available for the millions of cube-dwellers across the world to watch. Surely this film will get picked up by someone in some form, as there's no better look at what's really happening inside Iran.