Heroine in life and death

Crimes against humanity, be it genocide, slavery or systematic political oppression, are most effectively exposed through individual stories. Numbers dehumanize, blur together, but the diary of a single young girl forced into hiding before dying at the hands of the Nazis makes clear what, precisely, was lost during the Holocaust.

Which is why the shocking murder of Neda Agha-Soltan during what began as peaceful protests after the 2009 elections in Iran shocked and mobilized not only the citizens of her nation but also millions around the world. Shot by what many believe to be a government sniper, Neda’s death was captured on video by bystanders and uploaded to the Internet. The image of this lovely young woman lying in the street, her eyes wide and surprised as her blood pooled beneath her, became a symbol for all those killed or harmed by the Iranian government and Islamic extremists.

With HBO’s “For Neda,” documentarian Antony Thomas is determined to make this woman’s life just as famous, and effective, as her death. The film’s cornerstone is a series of interviews with Neda’s family, filmed at great personal risk by Iranian journalist Saeed Kamali Dehghan. Since Neda’s death, her family has been officially silenced -- it was not even allowed to publicly mourn her -- while contradictory and often ridiculous announcements about her death were made by the state. She was not dead, she was living in Greece. She was killed by the CIA, by the BBC, she wasn’t Neda, but an actress hired by Western forces to stir up trouble.

Unable to hire a film crew, Dehghan, who had been in Iran during the protests, returned to Tehran from Paris with equipment modified to look amateurish and met with family members in secret to find out who exactly Neda Agha-Soltan was: a woman who was indeed a symbol of what many hope will be the new Iran.

Described as “a fearless child,” she rebelled against the sexism of the society around her from an early age, refusing to wear a chador to school and traveling in Turkey, where she could experience more personal freedom. She read extensively, including banned books such as “Wuthering Heights” and “The Last Temptation of Christ,” loved Iranian pop music and Western clothes, all of which she could enjoy only in her home.

Overlaying Neda’s tale are images and interviews with government officials, journalists and citizens that remind us of the inequality women face in modern day Iran, where a woman is worth only half a man. From the ruthlessly enforced dress codes to a court system in which a woman’s testimony is regularly ignored, Iranian women live in a state of erasure, something Neda, like many women of her generation, fought.

Her death came when, for a moment, it seemed that some of their struggles would end in victory.

When incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appeared to have rigged the 2009 election, Iranians took to the streets in record numbers. Demonstrating peacefully, they demanded to know why the election results had been announced before the votes had been counted and how the opposition’s overwhelming support had diminished so greatly on the way to the ballot box. But soon Iran’s Supreme Leader ordered the protestors to go home or risk their lives at the hands of the military. When they did not, soldiers lined the streets of Tehran and the protests were peaceful no longer.

Although the government shut down the press, images of the protest and of military brutality filled the Internet, filmed by the cellphones and digital cameras and aided by Austin Heap, a young computer expert who worked feverishly to create proxy servers and finally managed to outwit the various firewalls.

But it was Neda’s death that gave the world a rallying point. Over Twitter and Facebook and YouTube, the sight of her blood and her stunned eyes as the light faded from them, the sound of the screams around her broke through the often banal digital maelstrom, reminding the world that the fight for freedom is ongoing and often fatal, even for the young and unarmed.

Many, including Newsweek correspondent Maziar Bahari and human rights advocate Rudi Bakhtiar, believe that the moment Neda died, things began to change. “It’s a long battle ahead,” Bakhtiar says, “but it’s the beginning of the end.”

Perhaps not only in Iran. For all its pitfalls and distractions, digital technology can now show in an instant what once took days, weeks and months to convey. (This documentary is appearing just a year after Neda’s death.) And in times of great crisis, speed can be just as important as strength.

mary.mcnamara@latimes.com

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‘For Neda’

Where: HBO

When: 9 p.m. Monday

Rating: TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14)