Full Story Films and Sky News have made a new one hour investigative film, Children of Minab (w/t), to air in July.

Led by Sky News’ International Affairs Editor Dominic Waghorn, the film investigates the devastating US missile strike on a primary school in Minab, Iran, on the first day of Operation Epic Fury, one of the US military’s largest civilian casualty incidents for decades. Waghorn travelled to Minab to report from the scene of the strike and meet survivors and bereaved families.

Directed by Emmy Award-winning documentary director Flora Bagenal working alongside Sky News’ award-winning Data and Forensics team and Forensic Architecture, the film combines eyewitness reporting with groundbreaking investigative analysis to reconstruct what happened and why.

Built on exceptional access inside Iran, the film will reveal the stories of families torn apart, while piecing together evidence pointing to a precise strike based on outdated intelligence.

Dominic Waghorn, International Affairs Editor for Sky News, says: “It is incredibly important to ensure that accurate reporting on this devastating moment continues to be at the forefront of the news agenda. Working with Sky News and Full Story Films on Children of Minab (w/t) means we can continue to highlight the atrocity that occurred on the 28th February, deliver groundbreaking investigative work that provides further insight into what happened, and continue to demand answers and justice for the people of Minab.”

Supporting the investigation is a meticulously reconstructed 3D digital model of Minab School and its surroundings, recreating the site before, during, and after the incident to enable an unprecedented examination of the attack and its aftermath. The model helps establish the circumstances in which civilians were killed with exceptional precision, testing accounts provided by state parties against the available evidence.

Created by Forensic Architecture, the research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London, it is built from videos, photographs, satellite imagery, and witness testimony collected, verified, and analysed by Sky News’ Data and Forensics team.

As US officials deflect responsibility, the film asks questions about whether changes to civilian harm protections and a military culture increasingly driven by speed and ‘lethality’ may have fed into the tragedy. Moving from the rubble of Minab to the systems and decisions behind it, Children of Minab (w/t) confronts a central and urgent question: was this a war crime?

Siobhan Sinnerton, Creative Director of Full Story Films, says: “When I joined Full Story Films, we set out to make films that were important, that delivered honest, top tier journalism, and that shone a spotlight on matters that deserve to be at the centre of the media narrative, and that is exactly what Children of Minab (w/t) does. Pulling together the skills of the world-class data and forensics team and the first on-the-ground reporting of the international teams at Sky News, this moving film will show the human cost of the war on the ground, and the decision-making that sits behind it.”

A complementary investigative report, covering key findings from Sky News’ Data and Forensics’ original journalism, has also published today across the Sky News App, social channels, and YouTube.