Prelude to A Strike is an investigative documentary that traces how right-wing Iranian diaspora groups aligned with Israel, the United States and Saudi Arabia co-opted grassroots Iranian struggles for democracy to sell the fantasy of foreign military intervention as the only way forward. The film reconstructs the evolution of US-Iran relations since the 2000s to show how the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia empowered right-wing groups pushing for policies that impoverished the Iranian people in the name of freeing them. Drawing on interviews with 30 experts in the US, UK, and Iran as well as archival footage, it traces how sanctions and then war undermined Iranians’ welfare, development, and their agency in creating political, economic, and social change.

The film traces this alliance through key moments starting from the 2009 protests, Obama-era sanctions and the JCPOA, Trump’s election and the end of the Nuclear Deal, the Woman, Life, Freedom movement and its co-optation by right-wing forces organized around Reza Pahlavi, and culminating in the 12-Day War, the January protests, and the second US/Israeli war on Iran in 2026.

The film argues that these groups normalized war by promoting violent polarization and constructing a dichotomy between Iran’s society and state. It investigates how this discourse was promoted through an imagined binary between Persian/secular/monarchist/pro-Israel identity on one side and Iranian/Muslim/Islamic Republican/Arab on the other, convincing Iranians it was possible to wage war on the Islamic Republic without destroying Iran.