HBO does this documentary ‘For Neda’

Remember Neda? She was the young Iranian woman shot to death last June 20 while protesting the Iranian presidential election. Tonight HBO tells her story:

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 at all, but an actress hired by Western forces to stir up trouble.

Unable to hire anything like 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.

“For Neda” airs at 9 pm.