The Vanishing Point

Filmmaker Bani Khoshnoudi was forced to leave Iran more than fifteen years ago when her documentary The Silent Majority Speaks was banned by the regime. Her family already had a long history of resisting oppression. In 1988, her mother's cousin was arrested and incarcerated in the infamous Evin Prison. Just 27 years old at the time, she was never heard from again.

Edited by Claire Atherton (known for her long collaboration with director Chantal Akerman, who died in 2015), The Vanishing Point is Khoshnoudi’s visual exploration of the memory of a family and a nation. She returns to her childhood home—now empty, it is still steeped in melancholy, alienation, and rage.

Personal belongings and political protests—filmed from the 1980s to the present—are a recurring theme in this essayistic documentary. The way decades of fear and repression accumulate in every crack of a house and every silence in a conversation is palpable; the very act of remembering becomes an act of resistance.