Director: Ebrahim Hatamikia

Cast: Parviz Parastouei, Azita Hajian, Qasem Zare, Kambiz Kashefi, Poupak Goldarre

Mojeh Mordeh is a 2001 Iranian war drama directed by Ebrahim Hatamikia, examining the long psychological shadow cast by the 1988 USS Vincennes incident — when a U.S. Navy warship shot down Iran Air Flight 655, killing all 290 people aboard. The film centers on a haunted military officer seeking some form of justice across the decade that followed.

What is Mojeh Mordeh about?

Lieutenant Morteza Rashed has spent a decade unable to escape the horror of that July day in 1988. In his nightmares, bodies and wreckage drift endlessly through water — a recurring image that refuses to release him. The attack on a civilian aircraft by those aboard USS Vincennes left Rashed not only with grief but with a consuming anger he has nowhere to direct. As years pass and the world moves on, he remains frozen at the moment of impact, quietly searching for any opening to hold someone accountable. The film follows this interior war — the daily cost of unresolved trauma, the loneliness of carrying a wound the world has largely forgotten, and the dangerous line between righteous memory and destructive fixation.

Cast & crew

Director Ebrahim Hatamikia is one of Iranian cinema's most significant voices in the sacred-defense genre, known for bringing psychological depth to war narratives. Parviz Parastouei leads as the tormented Rashed, with Azita Hajian, Qasem Zare, Kambiz Kashefi, and Poupak Goldarre rounding out the central ensemble.

Context & significance

The Iran Air Flight 655 tragedy remains a deeply felt wound in Iranian collective memory — 290 civilians killed, no accountability ever delivered. Hatamikia made Mojeh Mordeh as part of a body of work engaging with the Iran-Iraq War era and its aftermath, and this film extends that inquiry into state violence of a different kind: an act targeting civilians that the world moved past far too quickly. For diaspora audiences who lived through or grew up amid that period, the film speaks to the way unacknowledged grief can calcify into something that consumes a person. It is a rare Iranian film that centers this specific historical injustice with patience and restraint rather than polemic.

Where & how to watch

Mojeh Mordeh is available on K-Time with original Persian audio. Stream it on the web, your smart TV, or your phone — no VPN needed, no geo-blocking, and no extra download required. Subscription plans include a cancel-anytime option.