A Beacon When I’m Gone

On January 8, 2020, Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 was shot down by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps minutes after takeoff from Tehran, killing all 176 passengers and crew on board. The majority were Iranian, Iranian-Canadian, and dual-citizenship passengers — students, families, professionals — most of them bound for Canada. For three days, the Iranian government denied responsibility. When the truth could no longer be suppressed, the admission triggered one of the most emotionally charged waves of public protest Iran had seen since the 2019 uprising. Sardar Farrokhi was there.

A documentary photographer and filmmaker based in Toronto, Farrokhi was present on the ground in Iran during the January 2020 protests — one of the rare visual witnesses to capture the demonstrations from inside the country, at street level, in real time. A Beacon When I’m Gone is the photographic series that emerged from those nights: a direct, unflinching document of a society in the act of grief, fury, and collective refusal.

These images were made in the streets of Iran in the days following the IRGC’s admission on January 11, 2020. They show protest crowds, security forces, fire, darkness, and the faces of people who had stopped waiting for permission to be heard. The title of the project speaks to both absence and persistence — a beacon burns not for itself, but so that others can find their way.

A Beacon When I’m Gone is part of Farrokhi’s ongoing documentary body of work examining Iranian society, political resistance, and the human cost of authoritarian governance — a practice rooted in a decade of intimate, first-person visual storytelling between two worlds.