TEHRAN – Iranian filmmaker Ata Panahi has made a documentary named “Long Jump” exploring the leader of the Nazi Party in Germany Adolf Hitler’s plot to assassinate the Allied leaders during the Tehran Conference.

The idea of making the documentary came to Panahi’s mind when he was working on his debut feature documentary “Carsten’s Letters” in 2018 about Carsten, a German aviator and spy who was on a mission in Iran during WWII, and his letters to his wife Liana in Germany.

“In my research for the film, I stumbled upon a subject, which I had never seen in any book and I had never read anything about it before,” the filmmaker who is interested in the issues of World War II told the Persian service of MNA on Wednesday.

“I first thought that I was faced with an imaginary subject rather than a real documented event, but after some research into the issue I realized that when the Allied summit was scheduled to be organized in Tehran, Hitler was informed of the meeting and plotted to assassinate the Allied leaders in Tehran,” he added.

“Along with the film editor Pedram Bahrami, I gained access to archives that few people have access to; for example, we found a high-quality color film of the Allied summit,” he noted.

Panahi has remade some scenes of the event to attract more attention to his film.

There are different stories about Hitler’s plot to assassinate the Allied leaders during the Tehran Conference, therefore Panahi spent a lot of time studying to arrive at the most reliable one.

The Tehran Conference was a meeting between U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin in Tehran from November 28 and December 1, 1943.

During the conference, the leaders coordinated their military strategy against Germany and Japan and made a number of important decisions concerning the post-World War II era.

The film’s title refers to Operation Rösselsprung (Long Jump) that Germany designed to kill or kidnap Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt during the conference. The plot was foiled by clever intelligence work, a drunken disclosure and a bit of good luck.

Photo: Manuchehr Zendedel acts in a scene from Iranian filmmaker Ata Panahi’s documentary “Long Jump”.

MMS/YAW