Chronicle
Rouzbeh Rashidi · Chronicle
Chronicle
Twenty-five years in dates. The fuller account lives in the biography; the shape of the practice in Where to Begin. This page is the record reduced to its turning points.
I — Tehran2000–2004
2000Founds the Experimental Film Society in Tehran — a collective built from the ground, outside every official channel, in a country where avant-garde cinema had almost no permission to exist. The same year, begins the Homo Sapiens Project: the film-diary kept without script or plan, which will run through everything that follows.
2004Leaves Iran for Ireland, carrying the Society with him.
II — The First Phase2009–2021 · no script, no predetermined structure
2009Only Human — the debut feature. The feature-length film, rare in experimental cinema, becomes the principal medium.
2015Ten Years in the Sun receives its world premiere at the Dublin International Film Festival.
2016Trailers receives its world premiere at Cork Film Festival — “quite unlike anything else,” the Irish Examiner writes. With Ten Years in the Sun, the first phase reaches its formal extremities.
2017EFS becomes a film company. Luminous Void: Experimental Film Society Documents is published, co-edited with Maximilian Le Cain.
2018Phantom Islands premieres at the Dublin International Film Festival.
2019Founds EFS Film School — teaching begins as an organic extension of the filmmaking. Luminous Void: Docudrama closes the run of first-phase features.
2020The Society’s twentieth year: Luminous Void: Twenty Years of Experimental Film Society is published, and the exhibition of the same name is mounted at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin. Homo Sapiens Project (200) is completed — twenty years of the diary gathered into eight hours.
2021Homo Sapiens Project (201) is completed — the diary passes beyond its two-hundredth instalment.
III — The Second Phase2023– · the essay film
2023Elpis — the practice turns: slow cinema, poetic documentary, memory and war addressed directly, in words for the first time.
2025Dreaming Is Not Sleeping continues the turn — an essay on memory, existence, and time.
2026The archive opens fully online: every released film available directly from the filmmaker — to download and own.