Noghteh-e-Goriz

EN

“Exiled from Iran since the days of the Revolution, Bani Khoshnoudi now returns home in search of history. “Standing outside of time”, like the line in the film’s opening poem, the filmmaker interweaves temporalities: old newspapers collected by her aunt and recent protest videos; childhood home movies and images gathered secretly on the streets of Tehran. ‘The whole world is watching us. Don’t be afraid,’ says a man at a protest in 2009, as if the camera were a shield against repression. This faith in visibility that has formed a central tenet of political filmmaking evaporates in the face of an ongoing genocide for which there exists no image seemingly capable of diverting its course. Khoshnoudi is aware of this, and refrains from piling up evidence as such. Instead, she puts together an intricate visual garden, composed of varied and delicately cultivated images, from rebels graffitiing walls to quiet rainy landscapes. At a time when daily horrors penetrate our screens and our attention continually jumps to the next story, Noghteh-e-Goriz does not look away: a woman lies on the floor in agony; another woman is shot by a gunman while filming. The horrors are here too, but their materiality still matters.”

Victor Guimarães1

“These images of bare walls, cracked plaster and empty tables juxtapose Khoshnoudi’s conversations with her elderly relatives to suggest parallels with Chantal Akerman’s equally intimate final documentary No Home Movie (2015). Footage from 2009 sees Khoshnoudi in conversation with her aunt Farideh Mayel as they gaze at old photographs and volumes of newspaper clippings. A photograph from 1947 captures Farideh in all her youthful glamour and is contrasted with a tale of her skirmish with the morality police more than six decades later. Khoshnoudi believes it is essential to fight against the silencing of the past and yet her own family never mentions the fate of her mother’s younger cousin. Elements of her story are pieced together throughout the film as we learn that she was just 27 in 1988 when she was arrested by the authorities and incarcerated in Evin Prison. She was never seen again and her parents were presented with a plastic bag of her meagre belongings alongside a warning to say nothing. The family would never speak about it and Khoshnoudi’s desire to know more and keep her memory alive is indicative of countless families who have lost loved ones over the past half century. Editor Claire Atherton weaves together a wealth of home movies, still images and raw footage from sources in Iran. They convey a sense of the surface normality of everyday life as people are stuck in traffic, visit brightly lit shops or bustle along busy city streets. Nobody seems to talk to anyone, underlining Khoshnoudi’s point that in Iran ‘we cannot breathe the same way out of the house as we do indoors.’”

Allan Hunter2

“Khoshnoudi filmed for fifteen years, from 2000 to 2014, until she was no longer allowed to return to Iran because of her political recordings. She ‘filmed the whole time’, she says in Nyon, indiscriminately: street scenes, family scenes, the city, her aunt, the abandoned apartment of her deceased grandparents, every little detail, the inconspicuous. As if in an irrepressible longing to hold on to her homeland, which slips away from her, which eludes her, which a little later, when she is no longer allowed to return, disappears forever. The Vanishing Point is therefore not a filmed movie, nor is it a movie ‘about’ her cousin, for example, she says. The Vanishing Point is a material and montage film made under the direction of Claire Atherton. The editor is known for the films she edited for Chantal Akerman, who Khoshnoudi cites as another focal point of her artistic work. In the rich accumulation of material, Khoshnoudi simultaneously formulates a distrust in the images, just as she calls upon the testimony of the images; the flood of images in her film takes place in this tense relationship: but even she cannot capture the homeland, let alone bring it back. ‘I am haunted by disappearance,’ she says, haunted, as if disappearance were a ghost that takes possession of her. She wants to make a movie that sets a gravestone for all those who are simply gone, from one day to the next. Like her cousin, like the young demonstrators from the streets of Tehran, like the photos from the album she looks through with her aunt at the beginning of the film.”

Dunja Bialas3

• 1

  Victor Guimarães, cited on the Viennale website.

• 2

  Allan Hunter, “‘The Vanishing Point’ review: How Iran’s 1979 revolution unleashed generational trauma in one family,” Screen Daily, 16 April 2025.

• 3

  Dunja Bialas, “Material and montage: The Vanishing Point,” Artechock, April 2025. Originally published in German, translated to English the film’s press file.