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 Woman, 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. 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)
“The Vanishing Point starts from this point of exile – not being able to be physically back in a place that one originates from — and is concerned with fighting for and looking at how state violence has been so repetitive in creating this situation. It’s a personal diary film but it is also talking about people who have historically been fighting against fascism in Iran, as in other countries as well. You either leave or you stay and face the consequences.”
