LINK Television Takes Americans on a Political Journey: The Campaign of an Unlikely Iranian Presidential Candidate

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LINK Television Takes Americans on a Political Journey:  The Campaign of an Unlikely Iranian Presidential Candidate

By Afarin Majidi

The Bridge to Iran, which initially aired in May on Link Television, is a documentary film about long-shot presidential candidate, Mir Qanbar Heidari, a local villager in northern Iran, who is persistent on running for office despite having done so quite unsuccessfully three times thus far.

Qanbar is a modern-day Don Quixote, complete with his Iranian Sancho Panza, Seiffolah, who travels alongside Qanbar with a donkey and cart while the candidate bicycles to different regions in Iran with a megaphone, urging Khomeini’s message that one “should vote for the candidate he knows.”

Unlike the better-known presidential candidates, Qanbar wants no security entourage and hardly seems pleased with the publicity: at first he declines to allow the film crew to follow him on his campaign run, insisting that they will only exploit him.

In addition to his promises of bringing help to the needy and disadvantaged in Iran, viewers get a taste of Qanbar’s foreign policy. When asked about Iran-U.S relations, he matter-of-factly replies, “The wolf and sheep can’t get along.”

We see glimpses of Qanbar with his wife at home. She sits nearly lifeless in the far corner, shrouded in a chador. In between serving tea to the filmmaker and Qanbar, she is seemingly apathetic to her husband’s attempts at entering into political office, though she voices support when prompted by the filmmaker.  

Despite the futility of Qanbar’s campaign, the film is filled with moments of humor, endearment as well as incredible insight into the intricacies of the Iranian political system and the veterans’ and working class’s frustrations with the Islamic Republic.

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