After her 2009 film The Silent Majority Speaks – an unflinching portrait of Iran’s Green Movement – was banned, Bani Khoshnoudi was forced into exile. In The Vanishing Point, she breaks a decade-long family silence surrounding the fate of a missing cousin who was executed in Iran’s political prisons during the 1988 purges. Grappling with loss and alienation, she assembles rare surviving objects, fragments, archives, and moving images gathered over years of diary-style filmmaking in Iran to reflect on the pervasive fear that silenced her compatriots for decades, and the growing wave of resistance that continues to build in Iranian society of today, culminating in the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini and the rise of the Women, Life, Freedom movement. Through this diaristic film essay, Khoshnoudi turns memory into an act of defiance, confronting the collective generational trauma inflicted by the 1979 Islamic Revolution on countless Iranian families.
Her discursive and far-reaching work treats the past like dusty outlines on a wall where a picture once hung. Static shots of empty rooms and abandoned homes are juxtaposed with intimate conversations with elder female relatives and anonymous video footage from various sources. Beneath the surface normality of traffic jams, brightly lit storefronts, and bustling city streets, one senses the truth behind Khoshnoudi’s stark observation: “We cannot breathe the same way inside and outside the house.” Masterful editing by Claire Atherton – best known for her close collaboration with Chantal Akerman – binds together an abundance of home videos, photographs, and raw footage, building to a final crescendo in which Iranian women release a searing cry for freedom. The visuals are presented without contextualization, narration, or music – none is needed when the urgency of the present and the blinding force of daily disobedience speak so clearly. What does it mean to be erased – not only from your country’s official history, which tolerates no deviation from the norm, but also from the memory of your own family? Through videos of women who never stopped resisting, Khoshnoudi restores a lost family to her cousin. Her forgotten plea becomes part of the collective struggle of Iranian women, an undercurrent in the turbulent sea of rebellion, mapping out an invisible but unbreakable thread between those silenced and a new generation of those who refuse to be. (Dina Pokrajac)
Awards and Festivals:
VISIONS DU RÉEL (2025) – World Premiere, Burning Lights Jury Award
Bani Khoshnoudi is an Iranian filmmaker and visual artist whose work spans documentary and fiction films, as well as visual and photographic installations. Her works explore the history of modern Iran and the layered narratives and experiences of exile and migration. Her film The Silent Majority Speaks (2009), a political fresco spanning a century of Iranian resistance, was banned in both Lebanon and Iran, included in Georges Didi-Huberman’s exhibition at the Jeu de Paume, and named one of the ten most important films of the century by Nicole Brenez. Her fiction debut Fireflies (2019), shot in Mexico, won Best Ibero-American Feature at the Miami International Film Festival. In 2022, she received the prestigious Herb Alpert Award in Film/Video, and her work was featured in the main exhibition of the 60th Venice Biennale Foreigners Everywhere (curated by Adriano Pedrosa).
