15/04/2025 - Iranian director Bani Khoshnoudi tries to give life to the ghost of a family’s past that now only lives through the few objects that inhabited it

Winner of the Burning Lights Award at Visions du Réel, The Vanishing Point by Bani Khoshnoudi, Iranian filmmaker exiled in the United States, is a true visual poem that distills every word as if it were a soundless tear flowing out of an eye and ending up in the silent sea that is the collective memory of a country in revolt. After her film about the 2009 Green Movement got censored, Bani Khoshnoudi was no longer able to return to her native country. This exile forced her to rethink her personal story from another perspective, through the memories that she jealously guarded, thanks to witnesses who could still tell her about what happened, and through the objects that have survived her escape. In the film, however, she doesn’t talk directly about her life but about that of her cousin, who disappeared and was killed in an Iranian political prison in 1988.

The material at her disposal to break the silence of her family, full of fear and modesty, are then the few objects (very few photographs, a pair of glasses, a notebook) that belonged to her cousin, her own childhood memories, the whispered words and the videos of all the anonymous people who have captured the uprising of a wounded country reclaiming its freedom. Together with editor Claire Atherton, the director embarks on the almost desperate reconstruction of a life that ended tragically, in an attempt to reconnect to her own dignity. With minutiae and almost meditative calm, Bani Khoshnoudi’s camera focuses then on the page of a photo album from which a photo was torn out, contrasting with the freedom of a little girl who, in the present time of the narration, plays in the garden of a house. What does it mean to be deleted not only from the history of your own country, which doesn’t accept any deviation from the norm, but also from your own family history? This seems to be the central question that the filmmaker is asking herself. Thanks to the videos of those who never stopped fighting back, claiming their own sacrosanct right to exist (women first of all), the filmmaker gives a family back to her cousin, in a way, relocating her within a story made of cries, pain, hope and dignity.

In a personal, delicate and extremely brave fashion, the director weaves together her own family history and that of Iran, giving life to an essay film full of desperate poetry. Although the violence is never hidden, it doesn’t dominate the narrative. Indeed, horror manifests itself in a more subtle manner, as oblivion. Confronting us with the few crumbs that remain of those who are no longer with us, the film makes us face our own cowardice. How much courage does it take not to succumb to compromise, to exchange freedom for life? The Vanishing Point is an essential film capable of communicating, with the language of cinema, all the horror of having to stay silent in order to survive.

The Vanishing Point was produced by Pensée Sauvage Films (Iran/United States) and KinoElektron.

(Translated from Italian)