Together, the four episodes run for about seven hours and 34 minutes. The series is built largely around material recorded inside Iran: smartphone footage, eyewitness voices, scenes from streets and medical facilities, searches for missing relatives, mortuary and forensic sites, funerals and forty day memorial ceremonies. Manoto says the project brings together footage, testimonies and material from inside the country to reconstruct what happened during the January protests.
IsraelNews.io has embedded all four episodes below in their official playlist order, alongside the context needed to understand what they show, what has also been corroborated independently and which claims remain difficult to verify.
Content warning: The documentary contains highly distressing footage of shootings, seriously injured people, bodies in forensic and mortuary facilities, arrests, physical violence, grieving families and disturbing audio. Viewer discretion is advised.
Episode 1: The City Stops - how an economic protest spread
The first episode covers the opening 11 days of the movement, from December 28, 2025 through January 7, 2026. The immediate spark was economic: a sharp fall in the rial, high inflation and worsening living conditions. Protests by merchants and shopkeepers in Tehran spread to other towns and cities, while the demands quickly widened beyond currency prices and economic management.
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International documented force being used against protesters and bystanders during this early phase, including firearms, metal pellets, tear gas, water cannon and beatings. Deaths were already being reported in several provinces before January 8, even as the movement continued to expand.
That makes Episode 1 important to the chronology. January 8 and 9 were not isolated days that suddenly appeared without a lead-up. They followed more than a week of growing demonstrations, confrontations and an increasingly severe state response.
Episode 2: The Night of Hope - January 8 and the mass mobilization
Episode 2 focuses on January 8, corresponding to 18 Dey 1404 in the Iranian calendar. Large crowds went into the streets after a call to action by Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s last shah. That call should not be confused with the origin of the protests themselves: demonstrations had already been under way for 11 days, but January 8 became a major moment of nationwide mobilization.
International sources show that by then protests had spread across dozens of cities. Different organizations counted gatherings in different ways and at different dates, so there is no single number that captures the movement’s scale. What is clear is that it had moved far beyond a localized Tehran protest.
That evening, Iran entered a near total internet and telecommunications blackout. NetBlocks recorded a dramatic collapse in national connectivity, while UN reporting and international news organizations described widespread disruption. From that point, journalists and rights monitors had far less ability to observe events inside the country in real time.
The episode is built around the change in mood: crowds leaving their homes with hope and anticipation, followed by gunfire, injuries, confusion and fear as the security response escalates.
Episode 3: Kahrizak - when the search moved from streets to hospitals and morgues
Additional warning: Episode 3 is likely the most difficult installment to watch. Its official description places viewers amid shootings, wounded people, medical facilities, families searching for missing relatives and rows of bodies.
The third episode moves to January 9, the second day of the nationwide mobilization. Iran was already under a severe communications blackout, yet smartphone recordings continued to emerge. The episode follows shootings, casualties, improvised treatment locations, hospitals and families trying to discover what happened to relatives who never returned home.
Kahrizak, in Tehran Province, becomes one of the central locations. Precision matters here: in the context of this episode, the material concerns forensic and mortuary facilities. It should not automatically be described as Kahrizak prison. The documentary shifts from what happened in the streets to the aftermath, as relatives search hospitals, morgues and forensic centres.
Independent reporting supports the broader picture of extensive violence. Human Rights Watch said it verified video from hospitals and morgues from the protest period, while the UN’s independent fact finding mission said it was reviewing footage and photographs showing security forces firing on demonstrators. That does not authenticate every clip used by Manoto, but it does independently corroborate that significant parts of the crackdown were visually documented as they unfolded.
Episode 4: 40 Days - from missing person searches to funerals and memorials
The fourth episode turns from the crackdown itself to what followed. Families search for bodies, identify relatives, hold funerals and eventually gather for the traditional forty day mourning ceremonies observed after deaths or burials.
The documentary shows how mourning itself became, in some locations, a public space for memory and protest. Funerals and memorial gatherings included patriotic language, anti government chants and, in some cases, dancing, while families also faced security pressure and surveillance.
There was no single nationwide forty day anniversary. The ceremonies occurred on different dates depending on each person’s death or burial. Episode 4 therefore works less as a single day chronology and more as a record of how families tried to preserve names and stories after the immediate violence had passed.
More than 10,000 videos? What is known about how the series was assembled
Manoto says the series combines footage, testimony and material from inside Iran. Media coverage around the release reported that a small Manoto team spent more than six months reviewing more than 10,000 recordings made by people inside the country. That timeline is plausible, but there is no publicly available production log or methodology document that independently establishes the number or explains how every clip was assessed.
No detailed public methodology has been released describing whether original files and metadata were preserved, how locations and times were established, whether uploaders were interviewed, how duplicate clips were detected or what threshold a recording had to meet before inclusion. The safest description is therefore that Manoto says it assembled and reviewed a very large body of citizen footage, with the 10,000 plus figure remaining an attributed production claim.
Current coverage of the documentary also describes it as having no outside narrator, with events told through the images and voices of people who were there, accompanied by English subtitles. That choice gives the project much of its immediacy, but the absence of a narrator should not be confused with the absence of editorial selection, sequencing or interpretation.
How many people were killed? The answer changes with the source and methodology
One of the easiest mistakes to make when describing the January crackdown is to take one number and present it as the final death toll. As of September 28, 2026, there is no single universally accepted figure.
Iranian authorities announced 3,117 deaths in January. That is an official government figure, but the underlying records and classifications were not opened to full independent scrutiny.
HRANA reported at least 7,005 deaths by February 12, including government force personnel. The Associated Press said it could not independently verify the total because of access and communications restrictions.
Iran Human Rights published a minimum documented count of 4,219 deaths in September, based on a stricter case by case process involving names, dates, locations and multiple sources. The organization explicitly describes the figure as a documented minimum rather than an estimate of the ultimate total, which helps explain why it can be lower than HRANA’s broader tally without necessarily contradicting it.
Amnesty International concluded that security forces unlawfully killed thousands of protesters and bystanders on January 8 and 9 and injured tens of thousands. It also cited other estimates, including more than 5,000 deaths and medical source information suggesting the number could be considerably higher.
Coverage associated with the release of This Is Our Story has also circulated estimates approaching 30,000 deaths. That figure has not been independently confirmed and is substantially higher than the named or documented counts published by major human rights organizations. It should therefore be treated as an estimate associated with the documentary’s surrounding reporting, not as an established final total.
Why the phone footage matters
The January 8 blackout created a situation in which citizen recordings became one of the most important windows into what was happening inside Iran. A phone video can preserve gunfire, voices, faces, a street corner or a specific moment even when no news crew is present. At the same time, the clip alone may not tell a viewer exactly when it was recorded, where it was filmed, who appears in it or what happened immediately before and after the camera was turned on.
That is why the historical value of This Is Our Story does not eliminate the need for verification. It makes verification more important. The stronger and more disturbing a piece of evidence is, the more useful it is to distinguish between what the image itself clearly shows, what the filmmakers say about it and what independent investigators have been able to corroborate.
Taken together, the four episodes form a clear progression: economic protest, nationwide mobilization, a lethal crackdown under a communications blackout, searches for missing people and bodies, and then funerals and forty day memorials. Whatever final casualty figure future investigations establish, the series is an attempt to preserve the raw visual record created inside Iran at a moment when much of the outside world had limited ability to see what was happening in real time.
