A terribly moving story, both personal and political, about grief, anger and injustice.
On January 8, 2020, the Ukraine Airlines flight PS 752 to Montreal via Kiev, explodes shortly after take-off from Tehran airport, in the midst of a crisis between the United States and Iran. On board, the nearly 180 passengers die in the accident, including 145 Iranian or Iranian-Canadian citizens. Among them was Shadi, a young Iranian woman who lived in Toronto, who was in Iran to celebrate the New Year, and who was about to marry Nima, the son of Touka Neyestani and nephew of Mana Neyestani. Shadi’s family and friends, including Shaghayegh Moazzami, are devastated by the news. Very quickly, doubts about the causes of the accident spread, and it quickly becomes clear that, despite the regime’s denials, it is the Iranian army who fired two missiles at the plane.
In a shocking narrative, Touka, Mana and Shaghayegh take turns remembering this story, their relationship with Shadi and how the Iranian government’s attitude during this affair reflects the regime’s immense opacity, its endless paranoia and the threat it represents to its own people.
17 x 24 cm, softcover
208 pages
b&w and colors
Mana Neyestani was born in Tehran in 1973. He graduated as an architect but began his career in 1990 as a cartoonist and illustrator for many cultural, literary, economic and political magazines. With the rise of Iranian reformist newspapers in 1999 he became an editorial cartoonist.
Sidelined as a political cartoonist, Neyestani was forced to do children’s cartoons. One he did in 2006 led to his imprisonment and flight from the country. From 2007 to 2010 he lived in exile in Malaysia, doing cartoons for dissident Iranian websites worldwide. In the wake of the fraudulent election of 2009, his work has become an icon of defiance to the Iranian people. Neyestani has won numerous Iranian and international awards, most recently the 2010 CRNI Award for Courage. Since 2011, he lives in Paris, France with his wife. They are both refugees.
Shaghayegh Moazzami was born in 1986, in Iran. In 2010 she graduated from the university of art in Teheran. She was first a painter, but soon her love for storytelling galvanized her into making illustrations and comics. In 2016 she left Iran and settled in Canada. Since 2017, she has been working as an illustrator for Canadian web-magazines. Haunted is her first graphic novel in which she tells how the conservative mentality in Iran continued to traumatize her even after moving to Canada.
Born in 1960, Touka Neyestani is an Iranian illustrator living in Toronto, Canada. Prolific and surprising artist, he regularly collaborates with the press since the 1980s. His humorous and polictical cartoons have been published in more than 40 newspapers and magazines across the world. He contributed with his brother Mana Neyestani at the anthology Femme, Vie, Liberté (L’Iconoclaste, 2023).
