Directed by Ali Samadi Ahadi Club, IFI, Dublin, 80 min

THIS YEAR Panavision, Aaton and ARRI have all ceased production of film cameras in order to focus on the digital sector. It's the end of the movie camera but it is not, as yet, the end of cinema. No matter how many pixels are whizzing through Avataror how foggy found-footage films can be, the rules remain the same. Audiences are happy to go digital, but only if digital means the same creaky movie grammar they've known since the 1930s.

All the quirks that grew up around the elder art form’s technical limitations – reel length, physical cuts – have been preserved precisely within a new medium. It can’t last. Just as early silent films had to quit replicating theatre, some bright spark will come along and unhitch the language of cinema from its dusty celluloid constraints.

The Green Wavesuggests our post-cinema future may be closer than we think. Chronicling the events around the 2009 Iranian election, the wave of protests that followed and, finally, the incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's undemocratic crackdown, exiled animator-director Ali Samadi Ahadi has crafted a unique and striking documentary.

Drawing from accounts by bloggers, activists, beleaguered electoral employees and noted academics Shirin Ebadi and Mohsen Kadivar, The Green Wavefuses mobile phone footage, tweets, Facebook entries and animation to provide a dramatic illustration of political repression in action and a monument to those who lost their lives. Early scenes of sweeping solidarity as a Mousavi campaign rally gathers at a Tehran football stadium present a thrilling verdant hue. But Ahadi soon subverts "the colour of Islam, the colour of hope" into a snotty ooze. As dissidents disappear and campaigners are tortured, The Green Wavetakes on the oppressive, ailing palate of Israeli anime Waltz with Bashir.

The accompanying testimonies are equally ugly. As reformist presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi’s calls for social justice, equality and fairness give way to electoral fraud, brute force and human rights abuses, “endurance”, suggests one contributor, becomes the only option left for dissenters.

UN prosecutor Payam Akhavan maintains that those who bulldozed over a “seismic shift and democratic tidal wave” must ultimately be brought to justice: “They have to understand that their crimes are being documented, are being recorded, and a day will come when they have to answer.”

Given the well-established links between the Arab Spring and new Islamic cinema, The Green Wavemay be a last, best stab at keeping the revolution alive.