“As Iran is at a possible crossroads, it needs the urgency this film shows more than ever.”

“Freedom, freedom, freedom”

Under the cover of night, a young masked man throws a Molotov cocktail at a portrait of Ali Khamenei painted on a nondescript wall somewhere in Iran. It’s the early 2020s, a few years into another round of social unrest in the country. It’s an odd thought to write a review for a documentary that is, among other things, a cry for freedom for the people of Iran. In 2009, the year of the Green Movement, they took to the streets and chanted “Death to the dictator“. A decade later the chants echo in renewed protests, certainly once the modesty police have murdered Mahsa Amini in 2022. And now the dictator is indeed dead, the result of a nonsensical war started by Israel and the United States. But nothing has changed so far, ironically not even the name of the dictator. The final chapter in Bani Khoshnoudi’s documentary The Vanishing Point focuses on the fierce resistance of the Iranian people, in particular young and female, but if the past few weeks have taught us anything it is that the regime is still firmly in control, and the Iranian people find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place. It’s a dispiriting thought, especially when watching videos post the 2009 protests, the year Khoshnoudi was exiled from the country when her film about that uprising, The Silent Majority Speaks, was banned. Cut together by editor Claire Atherton, the various mobile videos, shot on the streets of Tehran and elsewhere by anonymous contributors, show a people fed up with its regime. Yet even when under attack by two of the strongest military forces in the world, the regime isn’t budging. “The whole world is looking at us. Have no fear,” says someone in one of the videos as the Basij, the regime’s volunteer paramilitary force, launch a tear gas attack on protesters in 2009. But if Khoshnoudi’s film shows anything, it’s that the world may be looking, but has very little influence to change the situation in Iran.

This becomes even more apparent in the hour that precedes the director’s jump forward to 2009 and to Iran’s people finally vocalizing their frustrations with the religious dictatorship. Khoshnoudi had left the country at a young age with her parents, but repeatedly returned, to film. Those return trips taught her that Iranians live two lives: the one behind closed doors, and the one in public. “We breathe differently inside or outside,” she muses. Even at home, fear sometimes seeps through the walls. The specter of repression hangs over the country, constantly, and it has always hung over Khoshnoudi’s family. Shortly after she went abroad for the first time, still a child, her mother’s younger cousin Nasanine was arrested by state police and sent to Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison. Months later, Nasanine’s parents were summoned to Evin to collect a few of their daughter’s personal belongings, along with the sinister threat to forever keep silent about the matter. And so the family did; Khoshnoudi’s uncle actually never spoke a word again.

And so memory is reduced to a small number of objects. A pair of glasses, with one lens loosened from the frame (one shudders at the possible reasons); a hairpin, a single earring, a small bottle. Perfume, perhaps? Nasanine’s notebook too. Khoshnoudi presents them without commentary, as if cherishing the memories she has of her cousin, a woman she later confesses she didn’t really know, in a letter that will never be read by its intended recipient. She tells her cousin that her fight has continued, that “the wall of fear has finally come down.” Her message is illustrated by more footage of ordinary Iranians in silent, and sometimes not so silent protest. Even under oppression Iranians show themselves drawn to poetry: “Their call to prayer is the hymn to our death” reads one of the spray-painted slogans, a text as grim as it is evocative.

Vocal protest, whether it be slogans written on a wall or loud calls for the “death of the dictator” are a sea change in Iran, and they started in 2009, three decades after the Iranian revolution. Before that pivotal moment in the country’s history, people kept quiet. Keep your head down, don’t talk about it, erase all memory. Khoshnoudi puts together footage, often without context, of street scenes in Tehran, filmed on her visits to the country before her exile. These scenes are often silent, a poignant choice; a minutes-long static shot of people coming down an elevator, hardly anyone speaking to another person, illustrates an extension of her own family’s silence. But silence eventually leads to the erasure of a person’s memory, and of a country’s memory. Where indeed is the vanishing point, the moment when all memory is gone? This is perhaps Khoshnoudi’s biggest motivation: keeping the memory of her cousin alive, and making sure that the people’s protests against this dictatorial regime are documented.

There is a small moment in the film that shows how such regimes use violence to strike down resistance, a moment that should resonate with American audiences in particular. A man is filmed from an apartment building, perhaps three floors up, as he is assaulted by a group of men, likely Revolutionary Guards or their attack dogs, the Basij. After a brief altercation, one of them shoots the unarmed man, who remains out of frame by the sheer luck of a window sill. This brief scene conjures up images of ICE, Donald Trump’s own attack dogs, killing innocent people in Minneapolis mere months ago. It’s a hair-raising moment, especially once you make this connection, perhaps unintended by Khoshnoudi but nevertheless hard to miss.

With The Vanishing Point Khoshnoudi has created a deeply personal and brave essay that connects her family’s history with that of the country of her birth in an immediate and urgent manner. Right now, as Iran is at a possible crossroads, it needs the urgency this film shows more than ever. Just as it needs the message of not staying silent despite the regime trying to silence it, whether through direct threat or by shutting down the internet so that the world cannot look at what is going on inside the country while its people are caught between a hammer and an anvil.