SYNOPSIS
After her film on Iran's 2009 Green Movement was banned, exiled filmmaker Bani Khoshnoudi traces her cousin, who vanished during the 1988 political repression. Working with French editor Claire Atherton, she crafts a visual essay from archival fragments—photos, personal items, anonymous protest footage—and stark observational scenes. Capturing the intersection of personal memory and national history, she confronts the violence that erased her cousin and countless others. The film becomes an inquiry into the ethics of representation and the resilience of memory, transforming absence into an act of resistance.
REVIEW
Forced into exile after her film about Iran’s Green Movement was censored, director Bani Khoshnoudi found herself unable to return to her homeland. From this state of dislocation, she began to reconstruct a history through the memories that haunted her, the testimony of those who survived, and the objects she carried with her.
Speaking as narrator, she turns her lens not on her own story, but on that of a cousin—disappeared and killed in 1988 while imprisoned as a political dissident. The raw materials for this act of reclamation are paper, photographs, scrapbooks, and video archives. The Vanishing Point juxtaposes the collective trauma that has scarred generations of Iranians since the 1979 Islamic Revolution with the intimate scale of a single family’s history, bringing the role of women in resistance movements into sharp focus. Like silent tears flowing into the vast sea of a nation’s memory, the film distills language and image into a potent form of visual poetry. What does it mean to be erased—not only from official history, but from the memory of one’s own family? This is the question that animates the director’s search. Shot partly on anonymous mobile phone cameras, the film pays tribute to those who risked everything to resist authority, amplifying their fierce and urgent cry for freedom.
DIRECTOR'S NOTE
I cannot travel back to Iran, so the film was made in France, with the collaboration of French editor Claire Atherton, (films of Chantal Akerman, Wang Bing) in order to construct this film through a unique method and vision that avoids pre-established structures and narratives. We worked over a year, looking at images and archives, and moving through a method of intuitive and organic editing, while accompanied by a process of writing the voice over of the film. The result is an intimate film that does not put the personal over the collective.
CONTACT
Bani KHOSHNOUDI
bani@penseesauvagefilms.com
