Where to Begin
Rouzbeh Rashidi · Where to Begin
Where to Begin
Forty released works, one practice, two phases. This page is a map, not an essay: two minutes here, and the shape of twenty-five years should be clear. The fuller account lives in the biography; the works themselves live in the filmography.
The Shape of the Work
2000The LaboratoryThe Homo Sapiens Project begins: a film-diary kept without script or plan — hundreds of instalments, the private laboratory in which everything that followed was first tried.
2009–2019The First PhaseEleven features, made as the diary was made: no screenplay, no predetermined structure — each film discovered in the act of filming, guided by intuition and immediacy. The phase reaches its formal extremities in Ten Years in the Sun and Trailers, and closes with Phantom Islands and Luminous Void: Docudrama.
2023–The Second PhaseWith Elpis, the practice turns: the essay film — slow cinema, poetic documentary, memory and war addressed directly, in words for the first time. Dreaming Is Not Sleeping continues the turn; the films that follow will deepen it.
Three Doors
There is no correct first film — but there are honest answers to honest questions.
I — IF YOU ASK WHERE TO START
Phantom Islands (2018) · 86 minutes
The answer has not changed: this film. A man and a woman on the Irish sea-coast, rendered in images that do the work of speech. The most immediate connection this cinema makes with someone meeting it for the first time. From here: Luminous Void: Docudrama.
Phantom Islands (2018) · 86 minutes
The answer has not changed: this film. A man and a woman on the Irish sea-coast, rendered in images that do the work of speech. The most immediate connection this cinema makes with someone meeting it for the first time. From here: Luminous Void: Docudrama.
II — IF YOU WANT CINEMA ON YOUR OWN TIME
Homo Sapiens Project (200) · 2000–2020 · eight hours
Not a long film: a work that stands outside the cinema hall altogether — at home in galleries, installations, and on your own screen, where you set the terms. At one screening it ran from midnight to eight in the morning, the audience invited to bring sleeping bags: to sleep before the projection, dream with it, wake into fragments of it, and sleep again. Watch it that way — across days, in any order of attention.
Homo Sapiens Project (200) · 2000–2020 · eight hours
Not a long film: a work that stands outside the cinema hall altogether — at home in galleries, installations, and on your own screen, where you set the terms. At one screening it ran from midnight to eight in the morning, the audience invited to bring sleeping bags: to sleep before the projection, dream with it, wake into fragments of it, and sleep again. Watch it that way — across days, in any order of attention.
III — IF YOU WANT THE FURTHEST POINT
Trailers (2016) · 180 minutes with Ten Years in the Sun (2015) · 148 minutes
The first phase at its limit. Trailers is the most cryptic and demanding work in this filmography — three hours without a word, where horror, science fiction, the occult and dream logic dissolve past genre into something almost alien. Its difficulty is not an obstacle; it is the film’s identity. Enter when you are ready — or approach it through Ten Years in the Sun, the epic that opened the way.
Trailers (2016) · 180 minutes with Ten Years in the Sun (2015) · 148 minutes
The first phase at its limit. Trailers is the most cryptic and demanding work in this filmography — three hours without a word, where horror, science fiction, the occult and dream logic dissolve past genre into something almost alien. Its difficulty is not an obstacle; it is the film’s identity. Enter when you are ready — or approach it through Ten Years in the Sun, the epic that opened the way.
The second phase — Elpis (2023) and Dreaming Is Not Sleeping (2025) — is not yet released for download. Their trailers can be watched now on their pages; the films will become available here in time. First word goes to the letter: Subscribe →
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