Cem

On the road to England, Arya, a young Afghan boy, crosses Europe's borders with other exiles. Near Italy he is separated from the group and sent by smugglers towards Paris. In Paris, in a small "transit" room, Arya meets Khorshid, a young girl who has lost her family on the road and who now lives victim to the desires of the smugglers.

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.

Exiled from Iran after the ban on her 2009 film about the Green Movement, a filmmaker breaks her family’s decades-long silence about a disappeared cousin, executed during the 1988 purges in political prisons.

Fourty years after the Iran–Iraq War bombs fall once again on Iran, weeks after street protests ended in the massacre of thousands of Iranians. While Israeli and American bombs fall, the regime keeps images under tight control. An endless war... of images.

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.

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.

“Exiles, refugees, undocumented migrants – whatever word we use to talk about it, the movement of human beings across the planet is a millennia-old and repetitive story, following the formations of our civilizations, their catastrophes and sometimes their downfalls.” By exploring the idea of the traces left by the movement of peoples since millennia, and immersing herself in the current context, Bani Khoshnoudi proposes a new film questioning the ethics of society in the face of the movement of human beings. In parallel with this film, she invited Italian dancer Valentina Campora to probe on stage the gestures and movements of the body (despised, misunderstood, politicized) in transit.

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.