Rouzbeh Rashidi · Teaching

I have taught experimental filmmaking since 2019 — in universities and art schools, at festivals, and through EFS Film School, which I founded. What I teach is not a method. There is no method. There is a way of seeing, and it can be transmitted, though it cannot be instructed.

Everything I bring to teaching comes from the practice itself. Experimental Film Society, which I began in 2000, has been a long apprenticeship in making films outside every industry — on little or nothing, in complete freedom, without permission. I teach from inside that work rather than above it. The teaching is an organic extension of the filmmaking: the same attention, the same refusal of the obvious, carried into the company of others.

Over the years my approach has moved from the rigid and the prosaic toward something more intuitive and exact. I ask students to attend to what a film is before what it means — to mood, to duration, to the weight of an image and the intelligence of sound — and, through that attention, to find the films that only they can make. The lecture becomes a kind of performance; the instruction becomes accompaniment. I hand down no style. I try to clear the ground on which a personal cinema can begin.

I teach as a freelance educator, in continuing collaboration with institutions. Between 2021 and 2024 I designed and taught a sustained series of courses and masterclasses at the Berlin Art Institute, and I have taught at the Universität der Künste Berlin. The students have come from everywhere; the work they carry away is their own.

Taught At

Universität der Künste Berlin · Berlin Art Institute (2021–2024) · Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach · filmArche, Berlin · Alma Manusutbildning, Sweden · Tirana International Film Festival · Department of Film and Media Studies, University College Cork · Kino Armata, Pristina · Tehran International Short Film Festival · Baltic Analog Lab, Riga · UNATC I. L. Caragiale, Bucharest · Lichtenberg Studios, Berlin

Courses, masterclasses, and mentoring are gathered at EFS Film School, where registration and all arrangements live.