The video begins with slow and depressing music and a frame of a man's hand carving illegible words into stone. In just these few short seconds the viewer is overwhelmed with signs. A language is being spoken that we cannot understand, and subtitles run across the bottom of the screen: "Dear Democratic President". The video is meant to be a letter, but the illegibility of the words and the unknown language distances the viewer from the writer. The signifier of rock scraping across rock to carve a letter we cannot read creates a sign for the signified classical letter that we can imagine in our minds: Ink to paper.
The carving of the stone letter is primitive and separate from that which we understand. And the otherness of the writer is emphasized in the next shot upwards toward the sky above him, which is locked high away behind the bars of his prison. The situation become more known to us, the viewers: "I hope you will read this someday". This letter carved into the walls of a stone prison is for a "Democratic President" - but who? What kind of democratic president would have thrown this soft-spoken man into a prison such as this?
"Perhaps a miracle will happen and your democratic attitude will change" As the writer is plunged into darkness, his carved word illuminate his prison and his words form pictures and memories within the small space. The rhetoric of these illuminated words is strong. People may be locked up and they may never see day light again, but their words and their dreams live forever and their discourse has already begun to shape their society. Words are invincible.
Small men created from the words of this writer illustrate the evils he has experienced. And one powerful, omnipotent hand is the representation of the aggressor. The hand is associated with strength and power and evil as it destroys and unmakes. The inversion of the word "democracy" upon the arm of the hand creates political implications - questioning how it is that we know and understand what democracy is.
The position we are to take after watching this video, with smaller and weaker men rising against a powerful and cruel fake democracy speaks to the ideal of a true democracy. But we never are told what a true democracy is, only what it is not. Is democracy the absence of injustice, or is it something more?
PS- There's also probably something to be said for the video being hosted on Youtube, because the internet was the only real way that people in the Iranian movement conveyed information to the outside world was through Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube.
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