Logline: Leila has won the one ticket out of Iran — until her husband is arrested days before the flight. When he’s finally released, it isn’t relief that fills their apartment, but the immigration papers still sitting in the closet, and a silence neither of them planned for.
Leila has won the lottery — a visa, a flight, an entirely different life. Then, three days before she’s set to leave, her husband Ahmad disappears into a wave of arrests sweeping the protests. She’s left to decide alone: wait for a man who may not come back in time, or board the plane without him.
Ahmad is eventually released. He comes home to an apartment that already smells like packing boxes and goodbye — but the woman who was meant to be there isn’t, not really. What’s left are her documents, abandoned in a closet, and a quiet that says more than she ever could have.
Burnt Dreams started as something I couldn’t not make. It comes out of the downing of Flight PS752 — a disaster that turned the sky into a mass grave for an entire generation’s plans. I keep thinking about the distance between a casualty count and an actual life: in a headline, a person becomes a number; in reality, each of those numbers was a whole world ending.
This film is for the people that catastrophe didn’t kill — the ones who survived it but left a piece of themselves somewhere over those mountains, among the wreckage.
I wanted to put on screen the specific kind of trap the Islamic Republic builds for its own people: a prison cell on one side, an open sky on the other, and no honest way to choose between them. In the film, one person’s release from prison (Ahmad) happens at almost the exact moment another person’s future falls apart (Leila). Leila is every dream that got stopped at the border before it could leave. Her presence in that apartment — half real, half memory — is what’s left when a life gets called off but the rooms haven’t caught up yet.
I didn’t want to shoot the missile, or the wreckage, or any of it from the outside. I wanted to find that same catastrophe inside one empty apartment — in unfinished visa paperwork, in the eyes of a man stuck between two different kinds of captivity: a cell in Iran, and grief for a flight that never landed. Burnt Dreams is for every passenger whose trip got cut short, and who somehow stayed behind anyway — in the furniture, in the walls, in the people who couldn’t leave with them. __Hamoon Mirzaei
Hamoon Mirzaei is a director and composer working across television, independent cinema, and music. He’s best known for directing Voice of Exile and Landless for Ayeneh TV. A graduate of the University of Tehran and the Tehran Conservatory, his filmography includes the documentary Maymand and the short films Reincarnation in Purgatory and The Damned Lottery. In 2023, his project Haft Khan received an Honorable Mention at the Student World Impact Film Festival (SWIFF), selected from over 13,000 entries worldwide, and his film H2O won Best Sound Design at the Kerman Film Festival. He continues to release original music through platforms including PMC and Radio Javan.
