Abandoned houses, surviving objects that carry memory. Exiled from Iran after her film on the 2009 Green Movement was banned, filmmaker and visual artist Bani Khoshnoudi breaks her family’s decades-long silence about a disappeared cousin, executed during the 1988 purges in Iran’s political prisons. Grappling with estrangement and loss, she uses fragments, archives, and the images made during her years of diaristic filming in Iran to reflect on the collective taboo, the fear that kept the population silent for so many years, and the explosion of resistance that continues to grow within Iranian society today. The film won, among other awards, the Jury Prize in the Burning Lights Competition at the Visions du Réel International Documentary Film Festival in Nyon.

Iranian filmmaker Bani Khoshnoudi creates works exploring modernity, exile, and migration. Her acclaimed films, like the banned The Silent Majority Speaks and award-winning Fireflies, have been featured at major exhibitions and festivals. A 2022 Herb Alpert Award winner, she lives between Mexico City and Paris. The film Noghteh-e-Goriz won, among other awards, the Jury Prize in the Burning Lights Competition at the Visions du Réel International Documentary Film Festival in Nyon.