The vanishing point- Migration and struggle in Iran
Since the 2009 protests, the Iranian people have become bolder and more desperate to challenge the increasingly repressive regime. Woman Life Freedom is a deeply-rooted movement, which will succeed against the patriarchal religious regime, without the ‘help’ of Trump and Netanyahu’s bombs.
Graham Douglas
Bani Khoshnoudi is an Iranian filmmaker concerned with issues of exile and the class struggle against the repressive regime in Iran. After the banning of her film on the 2009 Green Movement protests she went into exile. I spoke to her for The Prisma, after her latest film “The Vanishing Point” was shown at the Doclisboa film festival recently.
Long-term migrants often find that when they return to their home country they are not accepted as belonging, while still not feeling part of the country they migrated to. But in Bani’s case her long stay and education in the USA, absent during the terrible Iran-Iraq war, did not stop her from being accepted in Iran when she returned. Class divisions – a major interest of her work from her earlier film The Silent Majority Speaks – meant that taking a camera into the streets of poor neighbourhoods made her more connected to the realities of Iranian life, than more well-off people in Tehran. As she says: “I’ve always lived a displaced life, but it’s part of my identity now.”
Your previous films are about global migration and labour issues. How does “TheVanishing Point” connect with them?
The underlying questions in my work are related to displacement and exile. From there, I get to the layers of systemic and state violence, and historical resistance movements. “The Vanishing Point” starts from this point of exile –not being able to be physically back in a place that one originates from— and is concerned with fighting for and looking at how state violence has been so repetitive in creating this situation. It's a personal diary film but also talking about people who have historically been fighting against fascism in Iran, as in other countries as well. You either leave or you stay and face the consequences. These things are intertwined in one big question. Labour workers and class issues are always part of my work, because I'm concerned with the underclasses, the underrepresented, the invisible people.
The underclass, but is it fair to say that you come from quite an elite level of family?
Elite? Not really. Both my grandfathers were engineers. It was part of the project of modernisation in Iran in the 40s, 50s, getting access to different types of economies and then building our economy. Having a family that was educated, in comparison to the masses, yes, this is an elite, but we weren't part of a ruling class. They didn't leave in the same way those implicated in the Shah's regime did. They left because of political questions or social worries and to escape the violence. They left everything behind. Mostly, they weren't participating very actively in the revolution. But there is an elite class of people who live in the bubble of believing we need to go back to the past, the Shah.
One of your grandmothers was a friend of a government minister.
In Tehran of the 1930s, when my grandmother and her sisters were educated, they had access as girls because their father was running a school. He was a journalist and an intellectual, very critical of the monarchy, so they were exiled to a different city within Iran by Reza Shah. Farrokhrou Parsa, who later became the Minister of Culture, was also one of a small number of women who got access to education then and excelled. The numbers were growing, but it was a select group who had access to university.
You and your family left in 1979 and went to the US, and you've lived and been educated there for a long time. If you see yourself as a spokesperson against the regime, do Iranian people struggling against the regime now see you as someone who doesn't have a visceral understanding of their experiences?
It's a good question, when I started going back to Iran, I hadn't lived there through the Iran-Iraq war [1980-88] which really affected all my friends of my age. There were things that I never understood firsthand, but I was not a voyeur or there to take things. We made a cinema club in my grandmother's house, that you see in the film. I was involved in many questions as part of a community, and my visceral experience - I like that word a lot - was there in 2009, because I was alone with a camera walking around the streets filming what would become The Silent Majority Speaks, taking risks like everyone else. I became part of a continual repetitive struggle, and I can debate and speak. I don't ask myself whether it's authentic, because there are people living in Tehran all their life who’ve never seen many things that I was seeing and filming. I went to some of the poorest neighbourhoods where some friends didn’t even go.
I've always lived a displaced life, but it's also an identity. I feel like I'm an internationalist. When I speak about Iran, I always speak about Palestine, or Argentina, or Chile. We have always been living the same world problems. People want us to feel different, but having lived in the U.S., France, Mexico, Iran, I see that we have cultural differences in our ways of expressing, but our fights are the same.
Some of the film footage of street demonstrations is probably not well known in Western media. I was surprised how outspoken people were, chanting “Death to the dictator!”. Since the 2009 demonstrations, are people more willing to risk confronting the regime?
After 1999 protests at the University, 2009 became a mass reaction to the oppressive system using fraud and farcical elections. People who still tried peaceful voting, realized that it meant nothing anymore. The images from 2009 were mine, except for the internet images of two deaths (Neda Agha Soltan and a man). In The Silent Majority Speaks I mix more anonymous footage. As I say in the film, we looked each other in the eye. We told each other, non-verbally that we're trapped under this fascistic regime and we must do something. People are at boiling point now. Sanctions have made things worse, and the Iranian regime is completely guilty. More and more people are fed up with such hardship and on top of it having somebody wanting to control their thoughts, words, what they wear. It’s intolerable and a beautiful new generation has said that’s enough. The world in general is falling apart, but in Iran, the traditional structures of family and patriarchy are not working anymore. Women are the first to feel that, and they're fighting in a visceral way to exist.
Woman Life Freedom is a slogan that has become so well-known across the Western world now.
It's important to say that the women's struggle in Iran is historic, it has erupted in more or less organised ways for decades. Before Women Life Freedom, we had the huge 1 Million Signature Campaign, a reformist, civil society campaign, to change the laws. Now we've got to the point where we realise that we cannot reform a religious patriarchal system; it’s an oxymoron, it has to go. The heart of the Woman Life Freedom movement is not just about women, it has to do with invisibilized, oppressed people in Iran and elsewhere. But it has been co-opted and corrupted by the media, to say that only westernised Iranian women understand what it means to be free. Netanyahu and Trump use it: we're going to help you with our bombs to be free, which is completely ridiculous. Women Life Freedom comes from the mountains of Kurdistan from the heart of anti-colonial, anti-military, anti-fascistic struggle. We're now at this moment where most revolutionary movements get co-opted. That's always the strategy of those with power. But it's a very pure slogan, and we need to fight to maintain its real meaning.
The two women journalists who published the photo of Jina Mahsa Amini’s family and her body in the hospital were jailed for almost a year, and their newspaper had problems. Only through internal and international pressure were they released, although still being watched. Yet they also wear keffiyehs and speak out about what's happening in Palestine. This is the heart of the movement, not those Zionist-supporting Californian Iranians who say “Woman Life Freedom” while pushing for the Shah's son to take over. How retrograde is that? This is theft by people who have not been there and have no clue what society is living through.
The interview with images provided by Bani Khoshnoudi can be read at https://theprisma.co.uk/2025/11/24/the-vanishing-point-migration-and-struggle-in-iran/ where it was first published