Rouzbeh Rashidi · Experimental Film Society

An autonomous entity explicitly designed for producing cinema through experimentation.

Rouzbeh Rashidi founded the Experimental Film Society in Tehran in 2000, as a small collective devoted to avant-garde filmmaking apart from any official industry. Relocated to Dublin in 2004, it grew into an international constellation of filmmakers — among them Maximilian Le Cain, Atoosa Pour Hosseini, Michael Higgins, Jann Clavadetscher, and Shells Le Cain — recognised as one of the most distinctive and defiant presences in underground cinema.

EFS films conjure an intimate yet alien vision of the world through an exploratory, experiential approach to filmmaking: cinema made in complete freedom, at the margins of film culture and the outer limits of cinematic creativity. Every film on this site was produced within the Society; the Homo Sapiens Project lives inside it; it is the collective body from which this work emerged.