The Vanishing Point – Films

Noghteh-e-Goriz

Bani Khoshnoudi
Iran, United States, France | 2025 | 103 min
World premiere
Languages : Farsi, English
Subtitles : English, French

Jury Prize in the Burning Lights Competition offered by Canton de Vaud

Exiled from Iran after the ban on her 2009 film about the Green Movement, a filmmaker breaks her family’s decades-long silence about a disappeared cousin, executed during the 1988 purges in political prisons. Intertwining her personal history with that of her country, she translates an inextinguishable thirst for freedom, and a scream that echoes long after the end of this poignant film.

Exiled from Iran since her film on the Green Movement was banned in 2009, Bani Khoshnoudi can no longer return to her homeland. Instead, she thus collaborates with French editor Claire Atherton to craft a film from images and archival footage, embracing the full creative freedom this process allows. To break her family's decades-long silence about a cousin who disappeared—executed during the 1988 purges in Iran’s political prisons—the filmmaker turns her camera towards objects and memories, weaving them together with personal accounts, graceful glimpses of daily life, and anonymous videos filmed by Iranians resisting oppression at different moments in recent history. In an intimate and deeply personal approach, she intertwines individual and collective history with sensitivity, never shying away from the violence that permeates every gesture and detail, the anguish and the pain of nameless voices. An unquenchable thirst for freedom, a cry that lingers long after the film ends.
Émilie Bujès

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The Silent Majority Speaks, 2010
Ziba, 2012
A People in the Shadows, 2008
Transit, 2005