Lego as Martyr: Tehran's Unlikely Soft Power Tool

Ebrahim Raisi spent three years as Iran's president before a helicopter crash killed him and several senior officials in May 2024. He is now the subject of a stop-motion Lego film.

The short, produced by a group identifying itself as Legoi films and reported on 25 May 2026 by Tasnim News, depicts Raisi through the visual grammar of children's construction toys — block-built figures, animated sequences, the kind of painstaking frame-by-frame production that has attracted hobbyist communities worldwide. The film, according to the Tasnim report, covers Raisi's "actions and achievements" across his career.

It is the kind of cultural artefact that sits awkwardly in Western media categories. Not quite state propaganda in the traditional sense — no grainy archival footage, no anchor-introduced package. Not quite independent art either, given the implicit framing around a sitting and then martyred president. It occupies a middle space that Iranian cultural production has learned to exploit with increasing sophistication.

The question worth asking is not whether the film is propaganda — nearly all political memorialisation carries that function — but what Tehran's investment in this particular medium tells us about its evolving public diplomacy strategy.

Building the message brick by brick

Stop-motion animation using Lego has a distinct public profile online. Channels producing such content operate across YouTube, Telegram, and peer-to-peer sharing platforms, reaching audiences that do not self-identify as consumers of state media. The format is inexpensive to produce, visually legible across language barriers, and carries a built-in sense of craftsmanship that creates engagement independent of political content.

For a state like Iran — under varying degrees of Western sanctions, platform restrictions, and institutional hostility from legacy media gatekeepers — finding formats that can travel without requiring access to BBC or CNN is a genuine strategic priority. Lego stop-motion, paradoxically, is one such format. It requires no licence, no production facility beyond a camera and editing software, and no distribution agreement with a Western outlet. The film can circulate on Telegram, be clipped and re-uploaded to YouTube, and spread through community channels with no institutional fingerprint visible to the casual viewer.

That anonymity is not accidental. Iranian state media has long understood that overtly labelled public diplomacy — the kind that appears on PressTV or IRNA with all the visual signifiers of a state broadcaster — carries low credibility in non-aligned markets. The more effective approach is what scholars who study media strategy call "peripheral messaging": content that enters an information ecosystem through side channels, builds an audience on non-political grounds, and then introduces political content as a natural extension of existing engagement.

A medium that travels sideways

The choice of Lego as a medium carries its own logic. The toy occupies a unique cultural position — it is one of the few Western consumer products with genuinely global brand recognition that carries no obvious ideological charge. Children in Tehran, Lagos, Jakarta, and São Paulo play with Lego or Lego-equivalent construction sets. The visual vocabulary is transnational in a way that news footage is not.

This matters for a public diplomacy strategy that is less interested in winning argument than in seeding impression. A stop-motion film about a political figure, produced in the style of beloved hobbyist content, creates a different kind of memory trace than a four-minute news segment. Viewers who encounter the Raisi film in a feed of Lego animations are not receiving it as political communication — they are receiving it as content, and political content delivered as entertainment tends to bypass the critical faculties that news consumers apply to news.

The sources do not specify the film's intended audience, the platform strategy behind its release, or whether it forms part of a broader series of Legoi productions. That gap is significant: it leaves open the question of whether this is a one-off memorialisation exercise or a deliberate experiment in a format that Iranian cultural producers intend to scale. The absence of detail in the available reporting does not support either conclusion.

What this tells us about Tehran's communication apparatus

Iranian public diplomacy operates on a longer time horizon than Western crisis communications. Western governments tend to evaluate the success of their messaging in terms of news-cycle metrics — did the story trend, did the official get quoted, did the talking point appear in the next day's paper. Tehran, operating under sustained pressure from an adversarially positioned Western information ecosystem, has developed alternative metrics: durability of impression, breadth of incidental reach, and absence of the kind of institutional framing that would signal state involvement to a sceptical audience.

The Raisi Lego film fits that operating model. It does not need to be picked up by Reuters or AFP to achieve its objective. It needs to circulate — to exist as a piece of content in the kind of informal media environment where political messages spread not through gatekeepers but through recommendation, sharing, and algorithmic amplification. Telegram, where the film was first reported by Tasnim News, is precisely such an environment: encrypted, peer-to-peer, resistant to the editorial oversight that characterises mainstream social media platforms.

Western analysts have historically underweighted this strand of Iranian media strategy, focusing instead on the more visible — and more easily critiqued — output of state broadcasters and official press releases. The result is a systematic misreading of Tehran's information operations, one that treats the visible failures of official media as evidence of overall strategic weakness when the real investment has migrated to less legible channels.

Stakes and uncertainty

If this film represents a deliberate pivot toward informal, non-institutional media formats for political communication, the implications extend beyond the Raisi memorialisation exercise. Iran would be joining a pattern that multiple non-Western states have already identified: the strategic value of producing political content that travels under the cover of entertainment or hobbyist content, reaching audiences that have tuned out conventional state media entirely.

The counter-argument is straightforward: this may be nothing more than a tribute film produced by a small group of enthusiasts with implicit state approval, with no broader strategic design behind it. Iranian civil society includes creative producers who work in a range of styles, and Legoi films may simply be one such group that chose to honour a political figure in its own idiom. The absence of evidence of strategic orchestration does not prove its absence, but it also does not confirm its presence.

What the sources confirm is a fact: a Lego stop-motion film about Ebrahim Raisi exists, was produced by a group calling itself Legoi films, and was reported by Tasnim News on 25 May 2026. What the sources do not confirm is the production context, the distribution strategy, or the institutional relationship between Legoi films and any Iranian state entity. Those questions require reporting that the available sources do not yet provide.

Whether the film marks the beginning of a more systematic approach to informal political communication by Tehran — or is simply a one-off cultural artefact in a year of continued diplomatic tension — is a question that will require further observation of Iranian media production to answer.

This desk covers cultural production and media strategy in the Middle East. Monexus reported the existence of the Legoi film through Tasnim News on 25 May 2026. No additional institutional sourcing was available for this piece at time of publication.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/tasnimnews_en/38747