Kurdish-Canadian director Soran Mardookhi, with his latest documentary feature The Flight, recalls the doomed Ukraine Airlines Flight PS752 that in January 2020 crashed soon after taking off from an airport near Tehran.

All 176 passengers and crew members on board were killed by Iranian surface-to-air missiles that brought the Boeing 737 airliner down, with Iranian authorities at first covering up the tragedy.

But Mardookhi tells The Hollywood Reporter his feature documentary is not about the Middle East or politics.

“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 ahead of a world premiere for The Flight at the Vancouver Film Festival.

He doesn’t focus on the possible political and legal machinations that drove the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to finally admit missiles were fired at the ill-fated Ukrainian aircraft. His National Film Board of Canada film goes beyond numbers to humanize the Iranian-Canadian victims of Flight PS752 who have long slipped from news headlines, even as their families continue an uphill battle to hold Iran accountable.

The result is a documentary that chronicles how an Iranian-Canadian community with lost family members — many of whom were university students, newlywed couples and young children — launch the Association of Families of Flight PS752 Victims as a force to be reckoned with in in asserting Iran violated international law and regime authorities should reveal what really motivated the missiles strike.

The Flight: Vahid Emami, husband of Sahand Sadeghi and father of Sophie Emami, both of whom died in the Flight PS752 crash.

National Film Board of Canada

“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 explains of their collective action. The campaigning families have never accepted the explanations around the tragedy from Iranian authorities.

And they have been put through the wringer by Iran, not being seen or heard by regime authorities in Iran, despite their pleas for justice and redress. “As victims of terrorism, they have no rights,” Mardookhi says of the families.

The Flight includes home videos of the families singing, dancing and laughing before losing their loved ones and launching their collective action. “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 Flight also poignantly captures how the lost loved ones sought new lives in Canada tragically cut short when their plane was intentionally shot down. “They came to have a better life,” Mardookhi says of the 55 Canadian citizens and 30 permanent residents that were among the 176 people killed in the Flight PS752 tragedy.

The filmmaker, who is based in Vancouver, himself came to Canada in 2010 from Iranian Kurdistan after making films in Iran for around 10 years. That included his 2007 feature And Thus I Was Born produced underground to avoid entanglement with that country’s infamous censors.

And while he welcomes making movies in Canada free of overt censorship, Mardookhi says it took him many years to break free of the insidious and indirect ways Iranian authorities employ censorship to control filmmakers and silence dissidents. That realization came to him in 2014 on the Vancouver set of Turbulence, a feature drama about a father and his estranged daughter from Iraqi Kurdistan struggling to make Canada their new home.

“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?’” Mardookhi recalled, as he questioned whether his self-censhorship aimed to help not angering regime leaders should he return to Iran to visit family.

The result, the director adds, is today he uses art in his films as a narrative tool, and not to get round strict censorship as Iranian filmmakers constantly face. The Flight gets its first look on Oct. 8 at the Vancouver Film Festival, which runs through to Oct. 11.