Mojeh Mordeh (Dead Wave) finds acclaimed Iranian director Ebrahim Hatamikia in reflective territory: a 2001 war drama, led by Parviz Parastui, about a naval officer who cannot leave the summer of 1988 behind even as the world around him has moved on.
What is Mojeh Mordeh about?
Ten years after the Iran Air passenger plane was shot down over the Persian Gulf by the USS Vincennes in 1988, Lieutenant Morteza Rashed remains trapped by what he witnessed. Nightmares of bodies and children's dolls drifting on the water return to him again and again, and the discipline that once defined his military life now walls him off from his own family. His wife struggles to reach him, and the widening rift with the younger generation in his household — which sees its future differently than he does — forces Rashed to weigh the cost of the convictions he has carried for a decade. The film follows him as private grief and public duty pull in opposite directions.
About the cast
Parviz Parastui, the actor most closely identified with Hatamikia's cinema, carries the film with a coiled, interior performance as Rashed. Azita Hajian plays opposite him as the wife caught between loyalty and exhaustion, a role that earned her wide praise, while Ghasem Zare rounds out the principal cast. The pairing of Parastui and Hatamikia was already familiar to Iranian audiences from earlier collaborations.
Context & significance
Hatamikia built his reputation on films examining the Iran-Iraq war and its long aftermath, and Mojeh Mordeh belongs to the later, more questioning phase of that body of work. Rather than depicting combat, the 2001 film studies what a decade of unresolved mourning does to one household, set against a real historical event: the 1988 downing of an Iranian civilian airliner with 290 people aboard. Within Iranian cinema of the early 2000s it stands as a generational-divide drama, contrasting a father shaped by the war years with children shaped by everything that came after.
Watching Mojeh Mordeh on K-Time
Mojeh Mordeh streams on K-Time, the Persian-language platform serving the Iranian diaspora worldwide. This editorial page is open to all readers; playback requires signing in with a K-Time account, and the film is served from K-Time's own library across TV, web, and mobile.