نقطِہ گريز ( The Vanishing Point). 2025. USA/Iran/France. Directed by Bani Khoshnoudi. DCP. In Farsi, English; English subtitles. 103 min.
“Placing the first shot is like laying the foundation stone of a house,” Claire Atherton has noted. Through many months of shared dialogue and collaboration, Bani Khoshnoudi and Atherton constructed this documentary essay of astonishing breadth and urgency from family archives and years of diaristic filming in Iran prior to the director’s exile following her film on the 2009 Green Movement being banned. Breaking a decades-long silence, Khoshnoudi reconstructs the story of her disappeared cousin, who was executed at age 27 during the 1988 purges in Iran’s political prisons. Confronting the generational weight of silence on a population living under state violence, the film is equally rooted in the present day, swelling with the force of Iran’s unfolding popular protest movements.