Bani Khoshnoudi

Fireflies

Bani Khoshnoudi

Arash Marandi, Flor Eduarda Gurrola

Ramin flees from persecution in Iran and ends up living in the limbo of exile, far from everything he knows, in the tropical port town of Veracruz, Mexico. There his nostalgia and melancholy are confronted with new friendships, while he starts to rediscover his own desires.

A People in the Shadows

Bani Khoshnoudi

Almost thirty years after the revolution, and twenty since the end of the long Iran-Iraq war, A People in the Shadows takes us on a voyage into the heart of Tehran, a megalopolis of 14 million people. The city is still recovering from its past, as talk of sanctions and a possible American attack resonate. Using direct cinema methods, the film takes an intimate look at the way people live in this immense city today, caught up in the paradoxes and contradictions of their society, surrounded by images of past and future death, yet finding ways to juggle state propaganda and foreign threat on a daily basis.

Ziba

Bani Khoshnoudi

Ziba is an upper-class housewife in today's modern Tehran. Unable to relate to her environment or to her alienating life, she lives within her repetition unable to express to those around her what is wrong. But one long summer day, Ziba finds herself in an unexpected situaiton in the company of people unknown to her, confronted with her own choices and indecisions. Not a character portrait per se, this film works as a visceral metaphor of the general state of oppression and silence in Iran today.

Paradox of Time : Studies in Memory

Bani Khoshnoudi

Working with archival images from a key historic moment—the Iranian Revolution—the image-based study explores notions of duration (cinematic and historical), memory (virtual and image-based), and their sensory and emotional (affective) impact as historical and potentially ‘revolutionary’ themes. Repetition is explored as a principle of memory, as an aesthetic device, a space to inscribe meaning. Repetition is also explored as historical mimesis, as an eternal return, and as a possibility for reinvention. Finally, repetition is a means to question the role of agency in human nature. This image-based study is a work in progress and is carried out incrementally, whenever the need arises to examine, excavate and repeat the memory.

The Silent Majority Speaks

Bani Khoshnoudi

The Silent Majority Speaks collects images from several different cameras secretly recording the protests in the wake of the fraudulent June 2009 Iranian presidential elections. Clandestinely made and signed by the “Silent Collective,” the film mixes of-the-moment footage of the rise of Iran’s Green Movement with glimpses of revolutions long since suppressed and snippets of narration that recall a century of turbulence.