Iranian filmmaker Bani Khoshnoudi.Mitra Prieto/Supplied
Bani Khoshnoudi isn’t sure how she’s feeling. The shock of the U.S.-Israel strike on Iran that killed the country’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Feb. 28 hasn’t yet worn off.
Travelling from her home in Montreuil, a Parisian suburb, to New York and eventually, Toronto, where she will present her film The Vanishing Point, made her pull herself together, she says. Khoshnoudi’s film is screening as part of a series that she has curated on Lebanese filmmaker, writer and visual artist, Jocelyne Saab, that runs from March 12 to 22 at the TIFF Lightbox.
“Everyone is like this right now. It just fluctuates,” she says, letting out a sigh. It’s further complicated because there isn’t a consensus among the Iranian diaspora, including the large one in Toronto, she explains. There are differing viewpoints on whom to support as the situation in Iran escalates, including many that Khoshnoudi disagrees with.
Soon after the first strike, she was out protesting in the Paris streets. Several different groups across the city were voicing their opposition to the unrest in Iran, which soon began to spiral into a regional war.
“I’m more aligned in France with feminist and Kurdish groups, Iranians that are non-aligned – that don’t want this option or that option,” Khoshnoudi says, making note of the large marches protesting the killings carried out by the regime earlier this year. Those protesters are now marching against the war. “We try to continue, but it’s a bit difficult.”
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The recent events seem more surreal than prescient in relation to her film’s upcoming screening. The Vanishing Point, released in 2025, is a deeply personal documentary about the act of protesting. Khoshnoudi’s family left Tehran for the U.S. in 1979, when she was two-and-a-half years old. She grew up in Texas and returned to Iran when she was 22, after completing her studies in architecture and visual arts.
Upon her return, she got involved with the local film community and started to run an underground film club out of her home. She made four films, the last of which was The Silent Majority Speaks in 2010. The film clandestinely documented Iran’s Green Movement, and she mixed images of citizens challenging the 2009 presidential election results with glimpses of previously suppressed revolutions. The Silent Majority Speaks got banned in Lebanon in 2014 and was considered offensive to the Iranian regime. Khoshnoudi, who by then had a young child, decided she couldn’t live in Iran, fearing her safety.
The Vanishing Point, which traces the disappearance of a young family member in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison, was a story she had been thinking about for a long time. She had been mulling over her personal 15-year archive of shooting in Iran “on the streets, from my window, from different film shoots I did for other documentary work or fiction.”
Then, the Woman, Life, Freedom movement erupted in 2022, after the death of Mahsa Amini in custody in Iran. Those protests galvanized Khoshnoudi to work on The Vanishing Point, using recorded phone calls, home movies, family photos and found footage of demonstrations in Iran to illustrate the silence enforced by the country’s repressive regime.
The war under way right now has resulted in death and destruction. However, she says, the Iranian regime isn’t allowing citizens to document these events or even bear witness, and is instead controlling the narrative with visual propaganda. She has observed that people – including some of her own colleagues – are overwhelmed with emotion and passion, and have shared images that are being “propagated by the Iranian regime.”
While some have argued that this isn’t the appropriate time to express such critiques, Khoshnoudi feels this is the precise moment to voice her concerns. Some experts say the Iranian regime has for years been trying to gather momentum for a lengthy war.
The U.S.-Israel attack on Iran is “an imperial, colonial gesture by the Western powers. We have no doubt about that,” Khoshnoudi clarifies. “But it coincides with a need by this regime that’s become completely weakened in terms of popularity – if they ever had it.”
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It’s imperative to remember that the camera has a selective viewpoint, she adds. And since no one seems to know when the war will stop, people will carry these disseminated propaganda images with them in their daily lives. Khoshnoudi sees the seven-film series of Saab’s work that she has curated for TIFF as an opportunity to reconsider the Lebanese filmmaker’s legacy, and a reminder to question what we’re seeing unfold before our eyes.
In Khoshnoudi’s notes for the series, she describes how Saab, the founder of the Cultural Resistance International Film Festival in Beirut, was relentless in documenting the civil war in Lebanon, as well as the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the Western Sahara conflict. Putting together this series of restored works, from a filmmaker with whom Khoshnoudi shares a deep commitment to the kind of art she wants to make, was a moving experience.
“The importance of complexifying, not just taking sides, resonates so much today. Her films are so beautiful … because she’s always questioning the moment, and everybody that she meets,” she says. “She’s really trying to figure out what is happening and why.”