Bani Khoshnoudi at the Vanishing Point
A director considers stills from her latest film as sources of infinite mourning for Iran’s past—and collective hope for its future.
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| A still from Noghteh-e-Goriz (The Vanishing Point). 2025. Iran/USA/France. Courtesy Bani Khoshnoudi. |
by Bani Khoshnoudi, MoMA Magazine
Filmmaker and artist Bani Khoshnoudi was born in Tehran and emigrated to the United States as a child during the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Beginning in the late 1990s, she returned to Iran regularly to see family and make films, which explore themes of daily life under the Iranian regime and a long-running resistance. After her film about the 2009 Green Movement was banned by the Lebanese government, who called it an affront to the Iranian regime, she was permanently exiled from the country of her birth; today she resides in Mexico and France.
In her newest film, The Vanishing Point, which screens in MoMA’s Doc Fortnight festival on March 6 and 7, the artist delves into her family history through archives and years of diaristic filming in her home country, connecting the lasting effects of state violence that impacted her own family with present-day protest movements. In this personal essay, Khoshnoudi reflects on the “vanishing point” from which her work emerged, and reckons with the past from an uncertain present. —Sophie Cavoulacos, Associate Curator, Department of Film
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When I packed the last boxes of objects left in my grandparents’ home in Tehran, I did not know when I would see them again. Exactly 10 years later, when they finally reached me in Europe, I discovered what had seemed important for me to keep. While packing, I didn’t quite know why I should keep these particular objects or how I would use them later. I only knew that for some reason I had to. What I kept, besides family photo albums, was a small selection of what surrounded me in the last house I inhabited in Tehran: everyday objects, things from a distant past, and others that I had meticulously collected over the years. Paraphernalia attesting to a time that would soon disappear, at least for me. It was the last time I would walk down those streets.
“… We are standing outside of time with a bitter dagger stuck in our flank…”*
My film opens with Ahmad Shamlou’s poem “Nocturnal” (1972), which gives us words that sound and reverberate in darkness, as if spoken from deep in the gut. They resonate in a particular way today in the wake of new atrocities being experienced collectively in Iran, maybe the worst since the mass executions of the 1980s. But what’s the point of comparing and counting the dead? When you come from a place like Iran—or from Palestine, or numerous other places—you do not choose your history, neither the emotional baggage nor the literal suitcases that come with it. At birth, your life is already impacted by loss, mourning, panic, displacement, and longing, but inevitably also by a will to live and to resist that’s necessary for survival, for collective struggle. We inherit the wounds but also the hope for a time when healing can take place. For me, this is the vanishing point: a place suspended in front of us, seemingly out of reach, yet crucial in order to keep our gaze steady. Our place in time, in this time, is not only suspended (outside of time, in Shamlou’s terms) but also in perpetual repetition.
My first trip to Iran was a return; my last marked my exile. When I was two years old, we left the country at the height of political turmoil, yet I have no mental images left from that time. What remained were only sensations, a visceral connection that was reactivated upon my first return to those houses and streets some 20 years later. When I returned, the house was still there, yet there was no life in it. Clothes were hanging in the closets, waiting for the bodies to come back in order to carry forward a transmission of culture, but also of history and memory. Somehow this burden fell on my shoulders, and the subsequent images, moments, and objects that I would accumulate over the next two decades were in many ways an attempt to fill that void and the time I had lost.
What is silence, what is it, my dearest friend?
What is silence but unspoken words?
I am bereft of speech, but the sparrow’s language is the language of life,
Of flowing sentences, of nature’s celebrations.**
The houses, the streets and their names may have changed during those 20 years, but what had never moved were the mountains—the Alborz still hover over my birth city, as they have for generations. In my mind, they always existed as a protection, never leaving their spot no matter the mistakes made by the humans in their shadows. Yet after years of gazing up at them and walking in their foothills, I began to feel distressed that these mountains could be so motionless while the people down below were mourning their disappeared children, forced to attend to the details of daily life in total silence.
It is at the foot of the Alborz Mountains that we find Evin prison, whose ominous presence and name has existed in our minds since 1972. The last Shah built this immense prison just a few years before the revolution, handing its keys to his secret police, SAVAK, in order to contain and destroy the opposition. That is exactly what they did, until the new regime took the prison’s keys for themselves. In Iran, we live within a time that is both circular and repeating, no matter how tragic and dark.
Walter Benjamin says, “Historical time is infinite in every direction and unfulfilled at every moment.”*** This idea inhabits every corner of Tehran’s streets and houses, as it does my objects and images. An expansive and dislocated time permits our mourning to transform itself into something infinite. It is this infinity of pain—relived, reignited, revisited and ultimately remedied through images of and for our people—that makes the vanishing points less ghostly and more like points of focus, propelling our movement forward even when inertia and paralysis sneak up on us.
The vanishing point in a painted image, as described by John Berger in Ways of Seeing, refers to only one point of view: the viewer’s singular gaze on a given perspective.**** Yet if this vanishing point escapes the painting and inhabits a photographic or moving image, then it also escapes the confines of private experience. For me, this is where the personal and the collective fuse, in the images and movements that we initiate together.
Today, Iran’s streets, in dozens of cities, are once again stained by the blood of thousands of young people, spilled just weeks ago. This time, the massacre didn’t happen behind the closed doors of prisons but took place in the streets and alleyways, in homes, in cars, even in hospitals, targeting those who broke the silence. And images, once again, became a battleground. As the killing was about to begin, the regime turned off the streetlights, forced stores to close and go dark as well, and cut off all internet connections for more than 20 days. They hoped to make it impossible to film and witness while the young people’s cries in the dark were answered with bullets. Void and longing were felt by those of us who are far away, and it is only now, weeks after the massacre, that our images can be seen, shared, and archived. Although the atrocities continue, these images allow us to once again mourn collectively, and to project our hope onto the future.
Tulips rise from the blood of the fallen youth, the song says.***** But we don’t want any more tulips; we have had enough.
May those who have fallen never be forgotten.
Bani Khoshnoudi’s Noghteh-e-Goriz (The Vanishing Point) screens on March 6 and 7 as part of Doc Fortnight 2026: MoMA’s Festival of International Nonfiction Film and Media.
*Ahmad Shamlou, “Nocturnal” (1972), from the collection, Abraham in the Fire.
**Forough Farrokhzad, “Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season” (1974), translated by Michael C. Hillman. A Lonely Woman: Forough Farrokhzad and Her Poetry, Three Continents Press, 1985. 126-127.
***Walter Benjamin, “Trauerspiel and Tragedy” (1916), ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (The Belknap Press of Harvard Univeristy Press, 1996), 55.
****John Berger, Ways of Seeing, BBC and Penguin Books Ltd., 1972. 18.
*****Aref Qazvini, Tulips rise from the blood of the fallen youth. Song written for the Constitutional Revolution (1905–11).
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Via MoMA Magazine
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