On January 8, 2020, Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 departed Tehran carrying 176 passengers and crew members, including university students, newlywed couples and young children. Minutes after takeoff, the civilian aircraft was struck by two surface-to-air missiles, killing everyone on board.

Director Soran Mardookhi’s feature documentary The Flight follows the lives of family members left behind in their relentless pursuit of truth, justice and accountability for their lost loved ones.

On January 8, 2020, Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 departed Tehran carrying 176 passengers and crew members, including university students, newlywed couples and young children. Minutes after takeoff, the civilian aircraft was struck by two surface-to-air missiles, killing everyone on board. Iranian authorities attributed the downing to human error—an explanation the victims’ families never accepted.

Director Soran Mardookhi’s feature documentary The Flight follows the experiences of those left behind. For the families, this was not the end of the tragedy but the beginning of a journey that would forever change their lives.

If grief first brought them together, solidarity and a shared search for truth provided a purpose. Parents, spouses, siblings and grandparents with no background in activism, politics or international law suddenly found themselves building a national organization, navigating years of complex legal proceedings and bringing their fight for justice to international courts and institutions in their relentless pursuit of truth and accountability.

Home videos filled with music, dancing and laughter offer intimate glimpses of life before the loss. Alongside the search for justice, the film quietly observes the ways in which love and memory are carried forward, whether it’s organizing a 5K run, adopting a new dog or creating art.

More than the story of a civilian airliner brought down, The Flight is the saga of ordinary people who discover a strength they never imagined they possessed.

On January 8, 2020, Flight PS752 was struck by two surface-to-air missiles, killing everyone on board. Director Soran Mardookhi’s feature documentary The Flight follows the lives of family members left behind as they relentlessly pursue truth, justice and accountability for their loved ones.

I grew up in a Kurdistan where war, bombardment and political repression were part of its collective memory. From an early age, I saw how political power could enter the most private spaces of people’s lives. That experience, and later immigrating and building a new life in Canada, inevitably shaped the way I see the world as a filmmaker.

Before Flight PS752 was shot down, I spoke with my brother in Sna [Sanandaj]. He told me that our family friends, Arvin and Aida, were there too, about to leave for Tehran to catch their flight back to Canada. After it was shot down, my brother called again to tell me Arvin and Aida had been on board.

For three days, Iranian authorities lied about what had happened, claiming that the plane had gone down because of a technical failure. When mounting evidence made that lie impossible to sustain, they admitted that Flight PS752 had been shot down by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC, but called it “human error.”

For me, this film began there. It is a film I wish I had never had to make.

When many lives are taken at once, people can quickly become numbers. With PS752, that number is 176. It conveys the scale but can also obscure the individuals behind it. Each had a life, a family, friendships, humour, ambitions and a future they had imagined for themselves.

I wanted The Flight to resist that reduction. Home videos became essential because I did not want us to know the victims only through their absence or their families’ grief. I wanted us to hear their voices, watch them laugh, and see ordinary moments with their families and friends.

Nor did I want to make a film only about loss. Over the years I followed these families, I saw grief exist alongside humour, memory, friendship and daily life. A memory of someone who is gone can fill a room with laughter and, seconds later, bring silence. Both moments are equally true.

I witnessed individual grief become collective action as families, many of whom had never known one another before, came together and formed an association. Rejecting the official explanation of “human error,” they gathered evidence, worked with independent experts, organized demonstrations around the world and challenged the official account with facts. Through collective effort, ordinary people without institutional power changed the understanding of what had happened and compelled governments to confront the evidence.

This became as important to me as the crime itself and made me realize that the questions raised by The Flight reach far beyond PS752. When those in power are responsible for a crime, how does the truth emerge? Who holds power accountable? And what does justice mean when no court or verdict can bring back the people whose lives were taken?

Making this film gave new weight to words I thought I understood: truth, justice, accountability. For these families, they are not abstract ideas. They mean years of investigation, court proceedings, setbacks, small victories and the decision, again and again, to continue. In the film, Arash, Arvin’s brother, says, “Justice is a journey.” The longer I spent with the families, the more I understood what he meant.

With The Flight, I did not want to make a comprehensive political or geopolitical analysis. I wanted to stay close to the families and let their experiences shape the film. We worked with a small crew, interfered as little as possible and kept the cameras rolling even during breaks. Many of the film’s moments came from those unguarded spaces. I came prepared but learned to step back and let the families lead us.