Kurdish-Canadian director Soran Mardookhi has made a documentary that refuses to talk about politics, even when the subject is a missile attack. The Flight follows the families of the 176 people killed when Iranian surface-to-air missiles shot down Ukraine Airlines Flight PS752 in January 2020. Mardookhi tells The Hollywood Reporter his film is not about the Middle East or politics. It is about people.
The Crash and the Cover-Up
The Boeing 737 airliner crashed soon after taking off from an airport near Tehran. All 176 passengers and crew died. Iranian authorities initially covered up the tragedy. Mardookhi’s film focuses on the Iranian-Canadian victims, many of whom were university students, newlyweds, and young children.
The families did not accept the explanations from Iranian authorities. They formed the Association of Families of Flight PS752 Victims and pushed for accountability. “There’s individual families dealing with enormous personal loss, but they realized that together they could do things that would have been impossible on their own,” Mardookhi says.
Home Videos of Ordinary Lives
The film includes home videos of the families singing, dancing, and laughing before losing their loved ones. “We’re not talking about the lost people. We actually see them. We see part of their lives, sometimes very ordinary and sometimes best moments of their lives, like their wedding day,” Mardookhi explains.
The film also shows how the victims sought new lives in Canada, tragically cut short. “They came to have a better life,” Mardookhi says of the 55 Canadian citizens and 30 permanent residents among the dead.
Censorship, Then and Now
Mardookhi came to Canada in 2010 from Iranian Kurdistan after making films in Iran for around 10 years. His 2007 feature And Thus I Was Born was produced underground to avoid the country’s censors.
Even in Canada, he found censorship hiding in plain sight. In 2014, while directing Turbulence, a drama about a father and his estranged daughter from Iraqi Kurdistan, he realized he was censoring himself. “I was directing a scene and talking to the cast and, at that moment, I realized, oh my God, I’m censoring myself, even here. So I stopped and said, guys, I need just 10 minutes. And I went out and just thought, ‘what am I doing?'” he recalled.
| Film | Setting | Subject |
|---|---|---|
| And Thus I Was Born | Iran | Underground filmmaking |
| Turbulence | Vancouver | Father and daughter from Iraqi Kurdistan |
Today, he uses art as a narrative tool, not to evade censorship. The film premieres Oct. 8 at the Vancouver Film Festival.
A Story About Grief and Action
Mardookhi says the families have been put through the wringer by Iran, despite their pleas for justice. “As victims of terrorism, they have no rights,” he says of the families.
The film’s strength is its refusal to be political. It lets the families tell their own stories. “Once I start making the film, I kind of forget myself… I gave that space to the families who actually tell their own story,” Mardookhi says.
This is a film about ordinary people whose lives ended in extraordinary circumstances. It honors them by refusing to reduce them to a headline.
Source material: “‘The Flight’: After Iran Shot Down Ukraine Plane, Doc Follows Victims’ Families Fight for Justice,” The Hollywood Reporter.
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