Posters for feature films directed by Rouzbeh Rashidi, Graphic design by Pouya Ahmadi.

More info Pouya Ahmadi Website

The production of HE (2012) is now completed. The film is in post-production stage and will be completed very soon. Rouzbeh Rashidi is editing HE at the moment.

See the new screen grabs, behind the scene photographs and new teaser HERE

The four hours collaborative experimental feature film entitled “Persistencies of Sadness & Still Days” by Rouzbeh Rashidi & Maximilian Le Cain is currently in production in Cork city. Part minimalist fiction film, part video diary and experimental collage. There are only two rules in this open and inevitably sprawling venture: the final running time must amount to four hours and both Rashidi and Le Cain must appear on screen.

MINDSCAPES is a film event which strives to bring together established and emerging artists from around the world. Filmmakers Cassandra Sechler and Ginnetta Correli have curated the MINDSCAPES show in order to create exposure of dark, personal films often ignored by the commercial world. Works selected represent a critical movement happening under the belly of mainstream culture.

HSP (2) will play 8pm Sat Feb 11th 2012 @ the ATA (Artists’ Television Access, 992 Valencia Street (at 21st), San Francisco, CA 94110).

More info HERE

The scene (5) of The Last of Deductive Frames is completed.

Watch the Scene (5) HERE

As part of Rouzbeh Rashidi’s upcoming residency at The Guesthouse, Cork, he will be presenting three screenings each consisting of one of his features and one of Maximilian Le Cain shorter works:

Thursday 2nd February 2012, 8pm

Ten Minutes Isn’t Worth a Dream (2010) 25min by Maximilian Le Cain
Bipedality (2010) 67min by Rouzbeh Rashidi

Wednesday 8th February 2012, 8pm

Private Report (2009) 36min by Maximilian Le Cain
Cremation of an Ideology (2011) 62min by Rouzbeh Rashidi

Wednesday 15th February 2012, 8pm

… And The Poor Bird Died (2009) 10min by Maximilian Le Cain
tenebrous city and ill-lighted mortals (2011) 66min by Rouzbeh Rashidi

For more details HERE

The scene (4) of The Last of Deductive Frames is completed.

Experimental Film Society is an independent, not-for-profit film production company specialising in experimental, independent and no/low budget filmmaking. It was founded in 2000 in Tehran, Iran. Its aim is to produce and promote films by its members. Experimental Film Society unites works by a dozen filmmakers scattered across the globe, whose films are distinguished by an uncompromising, no-budget devotion to personal, experimental cinema. Experimental Film Society is responsible for rescuing and preserving many of its members’ films, which otherwise might have been lost forever. All the materials and films in this society are original and had made by EFS filmmakers. The current office of EFS is in Dublin / Ireland.

More info: www.experimentalfilmsociety.com

Now we are kicking off with three screenings over the month of March, including our first presentation in Chester Beatty Library, Dublin.

10 / 03 / 2012 – 1P.M @ Chester Beatty Library, Dublin Castle, Dublin 2.

Screening of contemporary films by Iranian filmmakers of EFS, with Q&A session afterwards. Screenings will include works by Bahar Samadi, Kamyar Kordestani, Hamid Shams Javi, Pouya Ahmadi and Rouzbeh Rashidi.  Also a short film by guest filmmakers, Arash Khakpour & Arash Radkia.

More info: www.cbl.ie

16 / 03 / 2012 – 7 P.M @ Seomra Spraoi, 10 Belvedere Court, off Gardiner Street, Dublin 1.

Screenings will include works by Bahar Samadi, Kamyar Kordestani, Hamid Shams Javi, Rouzbeh Rashidi, Michael Higgins, Dean Kavanagh, Esperanza Collado and Maximilian Le Cain.

More info: www.seomraspraoi.org

20 / 03 / 2012 – 8PM @ Cork Film Centre, Civic Trust House, 50 Pope’s Quay, Cork.

Screenings will include works by Bahar Samadi, Kamyar Kordestani, Hamid Shams Javi, Rouzbeh Rashidi, Michael Higgins, Dean Kavanagh, Esperanza Collado and Maximilian Le Cain.

More info: www.corkfilmcentre.com

The scene (3) of The Last of Deductive Frames is completed.

Watch the Scene (3) HERE

The Last of Deductive Frames Vimeo Channel

While in Cork in February 2012 for the residency in The Guesthouse, Rouzbeh Rashidi and Maximilian Le Cain will be making a four hour experimental feature film. Details and all the relevant information about the film will announced soon.

The Guesthouse is a visual artist-led initiative whose objective is to create a place for production, meeting and cross-practice peer exchange that includes various forms of public discourse and encounter.

Rouzbeh Rashidi will enjoy a 3 week residency at The Guesthouse in February 2012, for:

1_Completing the feature film HE

2_Recording soundscape for the film with Mick O’Shea

3_Also he will present a number of screenings in order to give a fuller understanding of the unusual ideas and techniques he employs in his work, and to create a dialogue around them.

More info HERE

JIT PHOKAEW is a Bangkok-based cinéphile and writer of the blog Limitless Cinema. PHOKAEW listed Zoetrope (2011) as best foreign film of the year in the Senses of Cinema World poll 2011:

Word Poll 2011

Watch the trailer HERE

The feature film Hades of Limbo (2012) is completed. Rouzbeh Rashidi wrote the precise and definite instruction of the shooting in Tehran, passed it on to Kamyar Kordestani and Hamid Shams Javi and directed the film remotely using Internet from Ireland. The result is a heavily visual, abstract experimental film that combines very along takes with the sulky urban landscapes, which explores the hugely opaque characters. Featuring: Hamid Shams Javi, Mahdi Safarali, Lena Khaghani & Mehdi Shafeie

This is collaboration between experimental film society and Stutter Film.

Trailer can be watched HERE

The 8th installment of Homo Sapiens Project will play from 18th to 20th of January, in the Joinery as part of Four is to Three (Selected Stories Programme Part Five). Four is to Three is a series of screenings and talks based around works that utilise, challenge and subvert a shared cultural and historical memory that has increasingly become framed in the technical and narrative apparatus of the moving image. The show also features works by Michael Higgins, Christopher O’Neill and Sylvia Schedelbauer.

Thursday/Friday 19/20th 12-6pm The Joinery, Arbour Hill, Stoneybatter, D7

Curated by Tadhg O’Sullivan. Four is to Three is part of the Selected Stories Programme curated by the Joinery and supported by the Arts Council.

More info The Joinery

The scene (2) of The Last of Deductive Frames is completed.

Watch the Scene (2) HERE

“The Last of Deductive Frames” is a collaborative omnibus feature film being made gradually over time by the members of Experimental Film Society. It is a film that starts but never finishes. Each filmmaker will contribute a ten minute section to it. These sections will be assembled in the order in which they are completed. This constantly growing work will initially be for the internet, but will eventually be presented on the big screen. The only strict rule at the outset is that each segment must last exactly ten minutes, although further rules might be added as the film develops. “The Last of Deductive Frames” is a living cinematic organism designed to forget its creators as it evolves.

Watch the Scene (1) HERE

The 70th installment of Rouzbeh Rashidi’s ongoing cinematic project “Homo Sapiens Project” is completed. This 21 minutes short film was shot in the deserts of Saveh, a city located around 100 km southwest of Tehran. The film features Ehsan Safarpour who frequently appeared in the early films of Rouzbeh Rashidi.

More info about HSP HERE

Experimental Conversations is Cork Film Centre’s online journal of experimental film, art cinema and video art. Rouzbeh Rashidi interviewed by Experimental Conversations Magazine in December 2011.

Read the interview HERE

The experimental feature film “Bard Is a Thing of Dread (2012)” by Rouzbeh Rashidi, featuring Reza Rashidi is now completed. The idea of this film was conceived in 2009 and only realized in 2012. This grim nightmare-like feature film was shot in only two days. The film can be categorized as minimal horror cinema too, a genre that Rouzbeh Rashidi is experimenting with within the realm of experimental cinema.

Watch the trailer HERE

“Rashidi-Devereaux Cinema” is filmmaker Rouzbeh Rashidi, and actor James Devereaux. Both highly experienced in their respective fields, they began collaborating in 2010, with the -inspired feature film, Closure Of Catharsis, about a man coming to terms with a repressed trauma. The film has enjoyed a strong response, and has been shown in Ireland, United Kingdom, Croatia and Chile, with more screenings to be confirmed.

More recently, Rashidi & Devereaux started work on the Irish Arts Council backed feature film, HE, about a man who, intent on killing himself, is recording messages for his wife and family. Filming began in Dublin this year, and will be completed in February 2012. They have also completed five shorts for The Homo Sapiens Project, a highly experimental, personal film series, part cryptic film diaries, and part impressionistic portraits of places and people.

Rashidi & Devereaux intend to create work over many many years, using their unique filmmaker-actor collaborative methods to construct an extensive filmography. Several new productions are already in the pipeline, and this website aims to keep you right up to date with everything that’s happening; They will be posting news, articles, reviews, Q and As, interviews, plus trailers, blogs, screening news, and developments with the Rashidi-Devereaux film workshops.”

Visit the RASHIDI-DEVEREAUX CINEMA website HERE

Blogger NUTS4R2 has written a review on Bipedality (2010).

Read HERE

Indwell Extinction of Hawks in Remoteness (2012), an experimental feature film by Rouzbeh Rashidi is now completed. This heavily hypnotic film was shot between 1998 and 2000 in Tehran with a VHS camera. This film belongs to a trilogy called “VHS Trilogy” which two of them have been made. The first one is “Reminiscences of Yearning (2011) and the second one is “Indwell Extinction of Hawks in Remoteness (2012). The third one will be shot once an old VHS camera can be found.

Watch the trailer HERE

Homo Sapiens Project is an ongoing series of personal video works by Rouzbeh Rashidi initiated in August 2011 for both online and screen context. They are highly experimental, part cryptic film diaries and part impressionistic portraits of places and people, and often suffused with an eerie sense of mystery reminiscent of horror cinema. From highly composed and distantly framed meditations to frenetically flickering plunges into the textural substance of moving images, the restless creativity of this vision of life as a cinematic laboratory is never short of surprising. Encompassing everything from documentary monologues to found footage, Rashidi constantly strives to expand his filmmaking palette while putting his unmistakeable stamp on whatever footage passes through his hands.

Produced By Experimental Film Society ©

For complete information please visit the Homo Sapiens Project Website

Véronique Martin review on the recent Experimental Film Society film screening @ CINEKINOSIS @ Cafe Kino, in Bristol UK.

Read HERE

“Closure of Catharsis”

by Rouzbeh Rashidi with James Devereaux,

a film inspired by the remodernist manifesto.

Shown on Tuesday 11 October 2011 at Café Kino in Bristol

(an evening organized by Juan Gabriel Gutierrez).

I love ambient music. This may be a strange way to start a movie review, but I promise it has some relevance. To many, ambient music is boring: nothing happens. But it is a misconception (at least in the case of good ambient). What it does is that it tunes our ear to a lower level of stimulation and makes us actually much more sensitive to subtle changes and detail. Try to listen to silence, you’ll understand.

Rouzbeh Rashidi’s film does just that. It removes us from the massive overload of sounds and images that a hectic life provides, from the ridiculous amount of stimulation offered by most types of entertainment — in particular by mainstream cinema. It effectively retunes us to a frequency that is closer to our deep, natural rhythm. It allows us to pause and reflect. And magically in doing so it never bores us.

From the first image of James Devereaux sitting on a bench in the middle of an urban park, we are grabbed. It comes first from James’s massively watchable persona but also from the quality of the soft black and white images and of Rouzbeh Rashidi’s art of filming.

The film is an experiment. James was told by Rouzbeh that he would film a trial two hour long take alone in a London park with a view to doing a feature film. His character was to be a man trying to remember an incident forgotten after a trauma.

The first seven minutes are silent (a lesser actor might have felt compelled to start talking earlier) but James’s face is a world in itself: a world of constantly changing micro-expressions. We can read the thoughts passing through his mind and watch his reactions to the park around him. To me, as a writer, it felt like an incredible treat to be able to watch a human face at close range and at length without feeling like a creep. Moreover, because of the total honesty and naturalness of James’s acting, there was nothing that felt untrue or contrived. And when I was not relishing the wide range of expressions on his face, I was looking at the park around him: at the trees, the lawns, the passers-by (Rouzbeh doing a couple of Hitchcockien appearances in the background).

After seven minutes, the first prompt was given to James off camera. An advert for Vodaphone. His face lit up (as it did each time he interacted with the director). But he didn’t pounce on it, just acknowledged it and read it aloud. There were several other prompts, but they were not as important in shaping his stream of consciousness, as were the inner workings of his mind and his interactions with other park users.

His first musings took the shape of a reflection on time: how boring it would be to live a really long life following the same everyday routine. His outlook was fresh and funny and the charm started to operate. His fear of big dogs and his rooting for squirrels; his recognition of the weirdness and vulnerability of his situation (on his own in the middle of London with a camera turned on him); his repeatedly trying to get back to what he was talking about before being interrupted; his playfully turning the lens of a camera on the director and on us; all contributed to our getting acquainted with the quirkiness and idiosyncrasies of a real person behind the possible masks (even if this person was a character played by an actor). What could have been an excruciating exercise in post-modernist, navel-gazing self-awareness was instead an endearingly candid and honest experience.

The first cut-away from James took place thirty minutes into the film and seemed somewhat related to what he was saying (talking of strange characters in the park and of drunkenness). It was a grainy and dark sequence of youths dancing in a bus stop at night, which was made all the more otherworldly and sinister by the juddery way it was filmed. The strange and mysterious beauty of the images made me feel that we were suddenly taken to another level of consciousness. As if the curtain of reality had been briefly lifted, and we could glimpse some deeper if enigmatic truth.

The other cut-aways were rather less than more obviously linked to James’s monologue, but they happened at moments of significance or pathos in his gradual confession. They were linked thematically by their melancholy beauty and by their depiction of people at moments in their lives where they were in waiting (whether the waiting was somewhat alleviated by a saxophone or a Danish pastry!). Landscapes were seen in passing, from a train or a car window, from the top of a bridge or the platform of a station. The way the pictures were framed gave them a special value: the mundane, although never embellished, being endowed with meaning, transformed into a work of art.

When we would come back to James’s monologue, the picture and sound got sharper. It was a relief as if we were allowed back home to the surface.  His monologue unfolded in a roundabout way, allowing his mind to make links that his character didn’t necessarily want to make (as between the television and the Yorkshire terrier). Going from humorous observations to gripping (but never glib or sentimental) admissions (for instance about his Yorkshire terrier runt), we were taken on a deep human journey that never ceased to absorb, intrigue and entertain.

At the end, it felt as if the character in the monologue had left the surface of the story to become part of the deeper level of awareness illustrated by the cut-aways. The wonderful, low drone music used during the cut-away scenes leaked out into his intervention. As we got deeper into the character and into the film, the gradually closer focus on his face and its final framing in a circle, as through a lens, paradoxically made him feel more and more distant from us. To me, that confirmed the sense that his catharsis had been a success.

Indeed James’s character has gone through a true confession, an “emotional cleansing” (acknowledging a childhood trauma and his responsibility in it) and has rallied with the unconscious world “behind the curtain”, deep inside himself. Although he has refused to make the final psychological link between the television and the terrier (his relationship to his sister and maybe his feeling of having actually been the runt) and has not realized he has reached a form of closure, his conclusion betrays a serene kind of wisdom: life will go on but what matters is to have tried and to try again.

In conclusion, this film is truly extraordinary. Its ambient structure is empowering and endows us, the viewers, with freedom of interpretation and the gift of creativity. “Closure of Catharsis” helps us understand a bit better what it means to be human. As such it fulfils what, to me, should be the definition for art.

On that note, I have heard people suggest that, due to its slow pace and apparent absence of plot, it would be better suited to an art exhibition (being shown on a loop, with viewers taking and leaving it at their convenience). To me, however, it would miss the point that “Closure of Catharsis” is a journey. Of course if it was the only way to allow people to see it (in this world of throwaway entertainment and fast profit), then it would be better than nothing. But it’s not an installation; it is a proper film. And it’s only by allowing yourself to get immersed in it and to follow it from start to finish, that its true value and depth can shine and that you too can experience catharsis, or emotional purging, through sharing a moment of artistic and human truth.

I have been privileged to watch it twice and will watch it again and again, confident each time to discover something new, something true, something about myself and something about the “eternal human”. It is a great film, and it is also a work of art.

“Véronique Martin” is an UK-based french author and writer.

veronique.martin@gmail.com

Closure of Catharsis will play in Festival Cine//B, Sunday 13th November 2011, 15.00 pm, CINE ARTE ALAMEDA, Santiago, Chile.

More info HERE Catalogue HERE

Film Festival CineB, at Saturday 12th November 2011, 15.00 pm, CINE ARTE ALAMEDA, Santiago, CHILE, will be screening the first programme of the short films of EFS in an international film festival :

“Founded and run by Dublin-based Iranian filmmaker Rouzbeh Rashidi, Experimental Film Society unites works by filmmakers scattered across the globe, whose films are distinguished by an uncompromising, no-budget devotion to personal, experimental cinema. Mainly, but not exclusively, drawn from a diaspora of Iranian artists, Experimental Film Society is responsible for rescuing and preserving many of its members’ films, which otherwise might have been lost forever.

This programme features a selection of works by some of the most prolific Experimental Film Society members: Jann Clavadetscher, Michael Higgins, Kamyar Kordestani, Hamid Shams Javi, Maximilian Le Cain (working in partnership with Vicky Langan), and Rashidi himself.”

 

More info HERE Catalogue HERE

Seeing the Light
Where film and video Collide: An exhibition of contemporary Irish experimental film curated by Maximilian Le Cain.

Preview 6pm Friday 4th November. Exhibition runs until Wednesday the 16th.
Screenings: The Consecutive Imposters Mon 7th 8pm, Ivan & Igor Buharovs Shorts Tues 8th 6pm, (An)Other Irish Cinema & Vicky Langan, Wed 9th 6pm.

Esperanza Collado // Rouzbeh Rashidi // Michael Higgins // Chris O’Neill // Soltan Karl

The visually intense experimental films that comprise this exhibition were all created with the textural particularity of celluloid as a key factor. Yet they are all presented, as many films are today, in a a digital format. Are they, therefore, still ‘films’? Or studies of film on video, the dynamic investigation of the properties of one medium by another?

Maximilian Le Cain will also programme and present a series of experimental film screenings in parallel with the exhibition.

Monday November 7th, 8pm: THE CONSECUTIVE IMPOSTORS

The Consecutive Impostors are Esperanza Collado and Maximilian Le Cain, and this screening presents work from or connected to their ongoing project ‘Operation Rewrite’. Stemming from an original conecpt of making very short videos for the internet following a set of strict formal rules, ‘Operation Rewrite’ has mutated into a multi-disciplinary art project that keeps at its centre the idea of the interruption as crucial to cinematic montage.

Tuesdsy November 8th, 6pm: IVAN & IGOR BUHAROV SHORTS PROGRAMME AND DISCUSSION

The partnership of Hungarian filmmakers Ivan & Igor Buharov has produced some of the most unique and quirkily beautiful experimental cinema to have come out of Europe in the past decade. To watch a Buharov film has been described as “getting lost in someone else’s dream. The directors Igor and Ivan Buharov invite us to see the insides of their brains through various amusing and absurd story-lines.”(Off Screen Film Festival, Brussels) These darkly playful hallucinations come with the aura of having been discovered in someone’s attic, precisely revealing a world perhaps subconsciously suspected but hitherto un-describable. Ivan & Igor Buharov will be present in person to discuss their work.

Wednesday November 9th, 6 pm: (AN)OTHER IRISH CINEMA & VICKY LANGAN

The (An)Other Irish Cinema screening project consists of the work of three Irish-based independent filmmakers: Donal Foreman, Rouzbeh Rashidi and Maximilian Le Cain. Although their styles are very different, they are linked by the use of exploratory, non-script-based approaches to filmmaking and by a keen awareness of the cinema histories that have explored the medium’s possibilities far beyond the accepted rules of the multiplex. This programme includes Foreman’s acclaimed fiction shorts Pull and Refuge; three episodes of Rashidi’s current, darkly hypnotic short film series Homo Sapiens Project; and the premiere of the visually overpowering Lullaby, the latest work in an ongoing creative partnership between Le Cain and Cork-based sound/performance artist Vicky Langan.

More info: www.corkfilmfest.org & www.tactic-art.info

Five “Homo Sapiens Project” by Rouzbeh Rashidi are now completed, featuring “James Devereaux”. These five short films will be played together as one programme. Details for screening coming soon!

Shebeen Flick is run in association with Jameson and the Screen Directors Guild of Ireland and is a new film night showing loved & unseen films on Tuesdays at 7pm in Shebeen Chic, 4 Georges Street, Dublin 2.

On November 15th 2011 Shebeen Flick will present the third screening of the short films Experimental Film Society:

1_Portrait & Temporality (Pouya Ahmadi / 2min / 2010 / Switzerland)

More info HERE

In January 2010 Rouzbeh Rashidi joined the Remodernist film movement. Remodernist film developed in the United States and the United Kingdom in the early 21st century with ideas related to those of the international art movement Stuckism and its manifesto, Remodernism. Key figures are Harris Smith and Jesse Richards.

On August 27, 2008, Jesse Richards published a 15 point Remodernist Film Manifesto, calling for a “new spirituality in cinema”, use of intuition in filmmaking, as well as describing the remodernist film as being a “stripped down, minimal, lyrical, punk kind of filmmaking”. In late August, 2009, an International Alliance of Remodernist Filmmakers was started by Jesse Richards in order to promote discussion and collaboration amongst those following the manifesto.

The Australian film magazine Filmink announced Rashidi’s participation in a compilation feature film by the Remodernist film movement in February 2010.

Rouzbeh Rashidi left Remodernist film movement in late 2011.

Rashidi’s resume with Remodernist film:

1_Two of his short films Grey (2008) and Now & Forever (2008) was picked by Jesse Richards for the short films of Remodernist film.

2_An article about Remodernist film & Jesse Richards was published on 17th August 2010 in Shargh Newspaper (Iran) by Kamyar Kordestani & with the help of Rouzbeh Rashidi.

3_Remodernist film manifesto was translated into Persian language by Kamyar Kordestani, Reza Radbeh & with the help of Rouzbeh Rashidi.

It was subsequently published on 31th August 2010 in the Shargh Newspaper (Iran).

4_Completion of the feature film Closure of Catharsis (2011) which was based and inspired by Remodernist film manifesto. Jesse Richards wrote a review about it and mentioned “Rouzbeh Rashidi has completed a brilliant new feature Closure of Catharsis, that begins with text noting that it was inspired by the Remodernist film manifesto.”

5_Contribution to the Remodernis omnibus feature film “In Passing (2011)“.

Four “Homo Sapiens Project” are now completed. This is the project that Rouzbeh Rashidi did with Polish Theatre Ireland. These four short films will be played together as one programme. ‎”Homo Sapiens” Project is an ongoing series of experimental and personal video works by Rouzbeh Rashidi initiated in August 2011 for both online and screen context.

Anatomy of Man (2008), Woodpecker (2010) & Entity of Haze (2010) by Rouzbeh Rashidi will be screening in the Hunters Moon Festival’s Short Experimental Films Cinema over the weekend on the 28th, 29th, and 30th of October 2011 in the Northwest of Ireland in Carrick on Shannon, County Leitrim, with a selection of shorts on rotations.

Two of Maximilian Le Cain collaborations with Vicky Langan, Light / Sound and Contact, and one of his films ‘as Soltan Karl’, Everybody’s Favourite Disease , will be shown as well.

More info HERE

(An)Other Irish Cinema will be presenting a programme of its short films in the “New Indie Voices Show-and-Tell” category of Darklight Film Festival @ The Factory Studio 5 Sat 22 – Oct 2011 14:00 – 19:30.

More info HERE

CINEKINOSIS present

‘Closure of Catharsis‘ (Rouzbeh Rashidi/2011/UK Ireland)

7.00pm  / free admission / October 11 2011

Cafe Kino 108 Stokes Croft, Bristol, United Kingdom.

Cafe Kino is very proud to have teamed up with acclaimed film-maker, Juan Gabriel Gutiérrez, to bring you a series of screenings from some of the world’s leading experimental and artist film-makers. Cinekinosis will be a regular series of understated and patiently beautiful avant-garde film and video, with occasional special guests. Cinekinosis is a series of informal evenings which aims to represent the pause and poetry of film – the silent movement in shadows, and slow breathe of photography.

Juan Gabriel Gutiérrez is a Colombian-born film-maker and musician, now based in Bristol, who’s recent film, Erw Dinmael, saw him hand-picked by Werner Herzog (Grizzly Man, Signs of Life etc) to attend his prestigious Rogue Film School.

www.cinekinosis.tumblr.com www.cafe-kino.com FB Event

James Devereaux has written a blog about his collaboration on Homo Sapiens Projects. When the staged looks real & the real looks staged. Or is there really any difference?

Read HERE

Homo Sapiens Project (1) will be screening in the 7th Lucca Film Festival 5-7 October 2011, Lucca, Italy.

More info HERE & HERE

Seven filmmakers from The Netherlands, Ireland, Iran and America, have come together, inspired by Jesse Richardsʼ 2008 Remodernist Film Manifesto, to create a collaborative feature film called “In Passing”.

In his manifesto, Richards calls for a new authenticity in cinema, a collective embracing of our flaws, a mass turning inwards. The inspired response from filmmakers all over the world sparked the idea of bringing a selection of them together to each make a short film that would all be combined to make a joint feature with no common theme except the inspiration sprouted from Richardʼs 15 point message. The results were distinctly unique yet connected, creating not a narrative, but the unfolding of a collective essence. The finished film is a unique cinematic experience; transfixing, beautiful, meditative and at times deeply personal.

The filmmakers are: Heidi Beaver (US), Christopher Michael Beer (US), Dean Kavanagh (Ireland), Roy Rezaali (Netherlands), Rouzbeh Rashidi (Iran, Ireland), Peter Rinaldi (US), Kate Shults (US)

Film WEBSITE

New website for upcoming feature film HE (2012).

Click HERE

The production of “HE”, latest experimental feature film by Rouzbeh Rashidi, featuring James Devereux, funded by Arts Council of Ireland has just begun. The film deals with the theme of suicide and will be completed in May 2012.

More info HERE

Woodpecker (2010) was screened in the experimental category of Festival Internacional Del Cortometraje, Bella Vista, Argentina on 30th of August 2011.

More info HERE

“Homo Sapiens Project” is an ongoing series of experimental and personal video works by Rouzbeh Rashidi initiated in August 2011 for both online and screen context. Produced By Experimental Film Society.

Homo Sapiens Project  (1) / (8 Min DSLR Stereo Colour Ireland 2011)

Anatomy of Man (2008) will be screening at flEXiff (The First and The Last Experimental International Film Festival) September 23-25 2011 at The Armory Theatre in Sydney Olympic Park and Reading Cinemas in Auburn.

More info HERE

The First EFS Screening took place at Hello Operator, Dublin. 19 short films were shown by 12 filmmakers. 4 of the filmmakers were at present and had a Q&A. 29/07/2011 (Ireland)

On July 29th, Hello Operator, Dublin, will host the first Experimental Film Society screening. Founded and run by Dublin-based Iranian filmmaker Rouzbeh Rashidi, Experimental Film Society unites works by a dozen filmmakers scattered across the globe, whose films are distinguished by an uncompromising, no-budget devotion to personal, experimental cinema. Mainly, but not exclusively, drawn from a diaspora of Iranian artists, Experimental Film Society is responsible for rescuing and preserving many of its members’ films, which otherwise might have been lost forever.

This programme, curated and presented by Rashidi, will feature works by all twelve Experimental Film Society members. Several of the filmmakers will also be present.

Short Films by: Mohammad Nick Dell, Mahdi Safarali, Navid Salajegheh, Bahar Samadi, Jann Clavadetscher, Behzad Haki, Pouya Ahmadi, Kamyar Kordestani, Michael Higgins, Maximilian Le Cain, Rouzbeh Rashidi & Hamid Shams.

Experimental Film Society is an independent, not-for-profit film production company specialising in avant-garde, independent and no/low budget filmmaking. It was founded in 2000 in Tehran, Iran. Its aim is to produce and promote films by its members.

For a full list of Experimental Film Society members, please visit:

Experimental Film Society website

Experimental Film Society on Facebook

Hello Operator website

July 29th, 7p.m, Hello Operator 12 Rutland Place Dublin 1, €5 Donation

“IN PASSING is an admirable work. At times it feels like experimental cinema, or an art installation, or minimalist narrative work, or cryptic documentary work, but it is none of these things, in a way it is beyond them. As an omnibus film, the seven pieces are unified – their exploration of the passing of time, the passage of space, and, more importantly, the “passing” (the imagining, the expression, the extinguishing) of cinema. The filmmakers are working under a “remodernist” designation, complete with a set of 15 “rules”. So it’s an attempt to renew cinema, to find new forms – as many of the modernist filmmakers of the ’60s wanted to do. (And did.) In an age where digital technology has given rise to a proliferation of filmmakers with nothing but commercial dreams in their heads for their moribund creations, this remodernist group of filmmakers is dreaming and believing in something else. And actually doing it. IN PASSING is an intriguing and exquisite work, filled with many delightful elements.”

Trailer can be watched HERE

More info HERE

- “Bill Mousoulis is a Greek-Australian independent filmmaker and critic, based in Europe (Greece). Since 1982, he has made over 90 films, including eight features. In 1985 he founded the Melbourne Super-8 Film Group and in 1999 founded the online film journal Senses of Cinema.”

Blogger “Nuts4R2” has written a review of Only Human (2009)

Read HERE