Bani Khoshnoudi and Jocelyne Saab

Khoshnoudi was only two when her family left Tehran and the upheaval of the Islamic Revolution of 1979. In 2005, she directed her first short film, Transit, the story of an Afghan boy’s journey through Europe, and within a few years, Khoshnoudi was back in Tehran, shooting her 2008 portrait of the city, A People in the Shadows. When The Silent Majority Speaks (2010), a chronicle of the rise of the 2009 Green Movement, was banned, Khoshnoudi left Iran and now divides her time between Paris and Mexico City.

“When you come from a place like Iran—or from Palestine, or numerous other places—you do not choose your history, neither the emotional baggage nor the literal suitcases that come with it,” writes Khoshnoudi in the Museum of Modern Art’s Magazine. “At birth, your life is already impacted by loss, mourning, panic, displacement, and longing, but inevitably also by a will to live and to resist that’s necessary for survival, for collective struggle. We inherit the wounds but also the hope for a time when healing can take place. For me, this is the vanishing point: a place suspended in front of us, seemingly out of reach, yet crucial in order to keep our gaze steady.”

In The Vanishing Point, Khoshnoudi sorts through family photos and newspaper clippings with her aunt and pieces together the story of her mother’s younger cousin, who was arrested in 1988, when she was just twenty-seven. She was taken to Evin Prison and never seen again.

“Editor Claire Atherton weaves together a wealth of home movies, still images, and raw footage,” writes Screen’s Allan Hunter. “They convey a sense of the surface normality of everyday life as people are stuck in traffic, visit brightly lit shops, or bustle along busy city streets. Nobody seems to talk to anyone, underlining Khoshnoudi’s point that in Iran ‘we cannot breathe the same way out of the house as we do indoors.’”

Born and raised in Beirut, Lebanese artist and filmmaker Jocelyne Saab worked for a time as a reporter for French television but eventually concentrated on a more personal, independent, and essayistic mode of filmmaking. Having founded the Cultural Resistance Film Festival in Beirut, Saab completed her final short film, My Name Is Mei Shigenobu, just ten days before she passed away in 2019.

“In the 1970s and ’80s, she was relentlessly taking the pulse of Lebanon in the thralls of civil war, Iran in the wake of its epic revolution, or else the heated conflict in the Western Sahara,” writes Khoshnoudi in her TIFF program notes. “Upon the occasion of new restorations of a number of her major works—both documentary and fiction—as well as continued turmoil in the region, this series could not be more timely and resonant.”

Alongside a dossier on Saab, Sabzian has also run a 2013 appreciation by Nicole Brenez, who wrote that Saab’s work had been “devoted entirely to underprivileged populations, displaced peoples, exiled combatants, war-torn cities, and those in the fourth world without a voice. Her creative journey has been one of the most exemplary and profound, rooted completely in historical violence, the multiple ways in which one can participate in it and resist it, and the awareness of the gestures and images needed to document it, reflect on it and remedy it.”

That piece was translated by Jonathan Mackris. “What moves me in Saab’s films, amid the violence she courageously records,” wrote Mackris for Screen Slate in 2024, “is the room she finds for beauty. Weathering the combined storm of imperialist violence, reactionary chauvinism, and poverty, her career is an example of an internationalism that transforms through the course of the twentieth century into a concern especially for the stateless, in a tradition once charted by Charlie Chaplin and Fritz Lang, and which continues today in the films by Wang Bing, Lech Kowalski, Alice Diop, and Sylvain George.”

That same year, Celluloid Liberation Front observed in Notebook that Saab “lived through the wars she documented, and her lyrical missives are marked both by fearlessness and vulnerability. Images of genocide now pile up in smartphone newsfeeds far faster than we can process them or investigate their implications. Saab’s cinema engenders a mode of viewership that is perhaps the very opposite of doomscrolling. Every image and every word are thoughtfully measured, carefully paired; her visual language is economical and penetrating.”