The career has one shape, and it can be stated at the outset. A film society founded by a nineteen-year-old in Tehran in 2000, apart from Iran’s official film industry, becomes the seed of a prolific underground movement. Its founder emigrates to Dublin in 2004 and rebuilds it there as an international collective of Ireland’s most uncompromising experimental filmmakers. Two constants hold through everything that follows: the Experimental Film Society, the collective frame within which nearly all the work happens; and the Homo Sapiens Project, the continuous, open-ended work into which – by deliberate decision – almost everything outside the features has been absorbed. In 2021 the life moves a third time, to Berlin, and the practice widens: the filmmaker becomes also a teacher, a commissioned curator, a juror, the founder of a school.

Everything in this account hangs on those movements. Exile is not the work’s subject so much as its condition – the reason a body of films could treat cinema itself as a homeland. What follows is the record of that idea worked out over twenty-five years: first as biography, then, in Part Two, in the filmmaker’s own words and in a sustained critical reading of the project at the centre of it all.

Rashidi’s artistic identity is profoundly shaped by experiences of exile and by a deep engagement with film theory and philosophy. A key intellectual influence is the late French critic Serge Daney, whose writings explored how a cinephile’s love of cinema can originate from an absence or loss. Daney observed that passion for film often stems from “the emptiness created by the absence of a paternal role model,” with the cinephile “like an orphan” seeking solace in the fantasy world of cinema. Rashidi has explicitly cited this idea, expanding it to his own life circumstances. In his case, the sense of orphanhood was not only personal but also cultural: he grew up amid the upheavals of post-revolutionary Iran and later found himself a stranger in a new country. Thus, he notes that Daney’s diagnosis is incomplete “without considering the absence of three other crucial elements: country, nation, and culture.” When those pillars are missing, “the individual is compelled to create their own cinematic universe in order to thrive,” turning cinema into a substitute home. The act of filmmaking became for him a “dialectical journey” resulting in “the poetry of Cinema as a way of life.”

Born and raised in Tehran during the tumultuous 1980s, Rashidi was directly affected by the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988) and the repressive atmosphere of the post-war Islamic Republic. He has described the eight-year war as a “gruelling ordeal” of his formative years, one whose trauma “simmer[s] beneath the surface” of his films. Rather than making overt war films, Rashidi channels these experiences in a veiled, symbolic manner – a creative choice that “has endowed his work and career with an enigmatic quality, teetering between clarity and mystery.” As he puts it, “everything and nothing coexist” in his cinematic world, which oscillates between the real and the surreal. Memories of war and loss haunt his imagery without ever being explicitly spelt out.

The founding of the Experimental Film Society in 2000 was the first act of that self-created universe. There was no infrastructure in Tehran for the cinema he wanted to make; he built one. The early films – short, searching works carrying titles such as Drowned Fish, History of Cinema and Aftershock of Old Memories, all of which the Homo Sapiens Project would later absorb – found their first audiences in the city’s small artist-run rooms. In July 2003 the K.C Javan cultural centre gave the twenty-three-year-old his first solo show; that autumn the Iranian Artists House presented his work in two group programmes. One film met the other face of the state: The Man’s Beautiful Wife (2002) was banned. In May 2004 a segment of Drowned Fish travelled to the Third Dubai International Film Festival – his first invitation abroad, with the costs covered by the host, a pattern that would come to define the career.

Later that year he left Iran. He was twenty-three, and the departure closed the first chapter of the practice while opening the wound – and the method – from which the rest of it grew.

Exile and dislocation are central themes that inform Rashidi’s philosophical approach to cinema. Having emigrated from Iran in his early twenties, he underwent the “tumultuous journey of immigration to Europe” and the “disorienting sense of being an outsider” in a new land. To navigate these challenges, Rashidi speaks of crafting a “fluid identity” for himself, one not bound to any single nationality. He initially refused to identify strictly as Iranian or Irish, instead “finding solace in being part of the world of Cinema and exile” itself. Cinema and exile became, in his words, “his true home.” Every film he makes is thus “fueled by the ‘agony’ that resides within his life,” the personal struggles and alienation transmuted into artistic expression. One scholar described his work as possessing an “eerie grittiness” that both “enraptures and estranges,” reflecting the condition of exile – belonging everywhere and nowhere. His heritage is from a “fractured ancient culture suspended between its past and future, devoid of any awareness of the present,” and his films likewise often exist in a timeless, dreamlike register.

Ireland gave that condition a working life. Through the late 2000s Rashidi rebuilt the Experimental Film Society in Dublin while making films at a ferocious rate; in 2009 came the debut feature, Only Human, and a first Irish recognition – Short Film of the Year at the National Student Media Awards, presented at Dublin’s Mansion House. From 2011 the public record thickens: the first EFS screening he curated and presented in Dublin, residencies at The Guesthouse in Cork in 2011, 2012 and 2013 – the second of them spent finishing the Arts Council-funded feature HE – and a run of screenings that made the Society a fixture of the Irish avant-garde. A further residency followed at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in 2017, and three stays at Lichtenberg Studios in Berlin – 2015, 2016 and 2021 – stitched a German thread into the Irish decade that would later prove decisive.

The Arts Council of Ireland became the practice’s most constant institutional companion. Film Project Awards in 2011, 2012 and 2015 carried HE, the Homo Sapiens Project and Trailers; bursaries followed in 2014, 2015, 2020 and 2022, a Next Generation Artist Award in 2013, an Agility Award in 2021. The Reel Art scheme – which commissions two creative documentaries a year – produced Phantom Islands, and an Open Call award of €54,500 made Luminous Void: Docudrama possible. Culture Ireland repeatedly sent the work, and its maker, abroad. For a filmmaker who had begun by financing everything himself, the Irish years turned an entirely private practice into a publicly recognised one – without softening it.

Dublin has remained the ground of the practice ever since, and from 2021 it acquired a second working horizon in Berlin. What Ireland had given – a collective, a public, a funder, a home for the idea that cinema could be one – has travelled with him everywhere since.

Politically, Rashidi avows that “every film [he’s] ever wanted to create has been political in the truest sense of the word,” insofar as it reflects his personal encounters with societal forces. Yet he deliberately avoids overt political messaging or didacticism. Throughout his career he has transformed his artistic style and methodology in response to political motivations while refraining from overtly addressing them within his films. In an ideal world, he muses, “films would be devoid of words, images, and sound” – a pure, universal experience unmarred by propaganda or even language. Rather than conveying a direct social statement, Rashidi’s films are the statement – a mode of being that implicitly contains his worldview. He is less interested in what a film is about than in how it is – how it feels, how it unfolds to the senses, how it phenomenologically engages the viewer. “In his films, the focus lies not on subject matters and meanings but on the impact and essence of events,” he explains. It is the “hidden intensity” and emotional resonance of cinematic events “rather than the events themselves” that he aims to capture and transmit.

Accordingly, Rashidi invites the audience to interact with his cinema on a sensory and intuitive level rather than through analytical interpretation. He has described his filmmaking as creating a kind of system or rhythm that the viewer “can travel through… creating a mental and physical response.” He doesn’t necessarily want the audience to “understand” a film intellectually so much as to “grasp it with their senses.” In one interview, he cites experimental filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky’s distinction between a cinema that “depicts” human beings and one that “has all the qualities of being human” in itself – a form of cinematic poetry. Rashidi explicitly aligns with the latter, treating his films as organic forms with their own heartbeat and pulse. This is why his works often dispense with conventional plot and dialogue in favour of mood, tone and texture. “Sometimes, even the creators may remain unsure of the visions they birthed,” he notes, yet those visions “can profoundly evoke emotions and stir sensations within” the audience. His cinema is to be felt before it is understood – a direct engagement of perception, much like encountering a painting or a piece of music.

Mysticism and metaphysics also inform this framework. His work is “deeply engaged with film history and primarily concerned with mysticism, philosophy, esotericism, cosmology, phenomenology, and hauntology.” In conversation, Rashidi has likened himself to a medium. “I think of myself as a medium,” he says, envisioning “a portal between the universes” through which he “transmit[s] energies” in the act of creation. Filmmaking for him is an almost alchemical or ritual act: “It is like I am having a séance when I am trying to trap images,” he elaborates; “the art of filmmaking – any good cinema – captures ghosts or these entities quite well.” The invocation of ghosts is not merely metaphorical. Many of his films feel haunted by invisible presences – the spectres of lost homelands and memories, or the lingering echoes of old movies and genres. He frequently cites the uncanny nature of the medium, noting that “cinema is all about ghosts and shadows” because once a film is finished and the moment of filming is gone, what remains is a ghostly trace of reality, “behav[ing] as if it is alive” even though that moment in time is dead. This sensibility aligns with hauntology – the term is Jacques Derrida’s, carried into film culture by Mark Fisher – which describes the way the persistence of the past haunts present culture. As an exile and a cinephile, Rashidi is constantly communing with absent things – the absent homeland, the absent past of cinema – and making them present as phantoms in his work.

One striking example is his use of landscape. Residing in Ireland, he became fascinated by the Irish landscape’s “haunted (and wild) quality” and its layers of history. For Phantom Islands he filmed on the west coast using antique nineteenth-century lenses as a “self-imposed austerity,” obscuring the image to make the invisible – the atmosphere of mystery, the ghosts of the place – more palpable. “These are hard and difficult lenses,” he admits, “but I had to find a way to really capture the enigmatic qualities of Ireland.” An anthropologist who studied his work noted that Ireland, with its turbulent history, “is a country full of ghosts – literally and figuratively – and Rashidi explores this visually” in his cinema. Through this lens one can see the practice as cine-shamanism: summoning images from the limbo of memory, history and imagination, and binding them into new cinematic forms through editing – a process he likens to channelling and controlling a magical ritual.

Despite these esoteric dimensions, the ultimate goal is not to mystify but to poeticise. He often refers to his work as poetic cinema. “Without the ability to create poetry, what purpose does Cinema serve?” he asks pointedly. What he means by poetry is a cinema that favours ambiguity, emotion and open interpretation – akin to how a poem evokes without spelling out. His films are unified by an oneiric imagination and operate on a logic of images and sounds more than narrative, placing him in the tradition of avant-garde poetic filmmakers – Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, the more experimental side of Andrei Tarkovsky – for whom cinema is akin to dreaming on film. In his most recent phase this poetics turned essayistic: after nearly two decades of cryptic experimental work he began to confront directly the themes of war and diaspora that had long underlain his cinema, in the essay films discussed in their place below. His cinematic philosophy thus synthesises many strands – cinephilia, phenomenology, mysticism, hauntology – into a singular aesthetic of exile: a cinema at once profoundly personal and open-ended, political in impulse yet poetic in form.

No account of this career makes sense with the collective removed from it. The Experimental Film Society is not a production company attached to a director; it is the counter-institution inside which the whole practice has been conducted – a body of filmmakers who share resources, appear in one another’s films, and exhibit together outside traditional venues. Through EFS, Rashidi has curated and exchanged screenings globally, helping sustain an alternative micro-cinema circuit that has carried the work from artist-run rooms in Cork and Bristol to cinematheques in South America and Asia.

The Society has names. Maximilian Le Cain, the Cork filmmaker with whom Rashidi has collaborated most closely for two decades, co-edited its book and co-directed its festival. Atoosa Pour Hosseini, Jann Clavadetscher, Vicky Langan and Michael Higgins are among the filmmakers whose work EFS has gathered and presented alongside his own. Forbidden Symmetries (2014), co-directed with Le Cain, condensed the collective principle into a single work; Rashidi’s section of it screened at the Österreichisches Filmmuseum in Vienna during the museum’s fiftieth-anniversary programme in 2014. The Society even has a house band of sorts: Cinema Cyanide, its music project, remixes the soundtracks of earlier EFS films into new sonic works, feeding the collective’s past back into its present.

The institution-building has been deliberate. In 2018 EFS mounted its own festival – A Luminous Void, at The New Theatre in Dublin’s Temple Bar – and in December 2019 Rashidi served as artistic director, with Le Cain, of the Luminous Void Experimental Film Festival at Triskel Arts Centre in Cork, where four EFS world premieres screened and every programme ended in a filmmakers’ Q&A. In 2020 the Society’s two decades were fixed in print: Luminous Void: Twenty Years of Experimental Film Society, edited by Rashidi with Le Cain and Pour Hosseini, was launched that December with the critic Adrian Martin as guest speaker. Mentoring younger colleagues, publishing, programming, and eventually a school of his own – this grass-roots institution-building parallels the artistic journey, underlining a commitment to an “entirely away from mainstream” mode of filmmaking maintained since Tehran.

The Homo Sapiens Project is the central and continuing work. Its earliest material dates from 2000 – HSP (200), the volume that gathers it, was begun that year – but the Project was named, and its principle declared, in 2011: it took Rashidi over a decade to recognise the scope of what he had been making. It started as cryptic film diaries and oneiric sketches and has undergone an organic metamorphosis into fully realised feature-length films, without ever abandoning the diaristic principle from which it came. It is a notebook that became an architecture.

Its governing decision – and it is a decision, not an accident of cataloguing – is that HSP has absorbed everything. Every short film, every experiment, every fragment made outside the features has been drawn into the Project and now exists within it. Titles that once circulated independently in the early years are not separate works competing with HSP for a place in the record; they are earlier states of material that HSP has since taken in. The only exception is the feature films, which remain the core of the work and stand as they are.

This has a consequence that is easy to mistake for a clerical error. A screening from 2003 may carry a title that later disappeared, or a date that a subsequent labelling revised. Nothing there is inconsistent. What is visible is the absorption itself – a body of work reorganising its own past, which is the prerogative of a practice conducted over decades rather than delivered in discrete units. The early filmography is real, and it is historical apparatus; the Project is what became of it.

The Project’s public life has been as unconventional as its form. A volume of it won Short Film of the Year at Ireland’s National Student Media Awards in 2009 while still a work in progress. Two of its culminating volumes measure its scale: HSP (200), begun in 2000 and completed in 2020, runs 490 minutes; HSP (201), begun in 2002 and finished in 2021, runs 1,150 minutes – a feature-length omnibus work imagined, in Rashidi’s phrase, for both human and “extra-terrestrial” audiences, with invited contributions from experimental filmmakers internationally. At the 70th Berlin International Film Festival in 2020 he was selected for Berlinale Talents, where he presented the Project as a whole – an overview of a work that cannot be screened so much as entered. Cinematheques from Tehran to Riga have programmed HSP selections; several features grew directly out of its experiments.

HSP therefore functions less as a series than as a condition of production. It is the place where the practice thinks – where forms are tested without the obligation to arrive, where a film may be three minutes or three hours, where failure is retained rather than discarded. Its length is not a measure of ambition but of duration: it continues because the practice continues, and it will end when the practice does. Part Two of this document is devoted to it – the filmmaker’s own statements, and a critical essay on what the Project proposes about cinema itself.

The features are the load-bearing works: eleven of them between 2009 and 2019, each made entirely outside the industry, together forming a single sustained argument with narrative cinema. They are presented here in order; the essay films of the Berlin years, Elpis and Dreaming Is Not Sleeping, belong to a later chapter.

The debut, a zero-budget independent production, established the penchant for non-linear, poetic structure at the outset. When it played the Flat Lake festival in Monaghan the following summer, the programme billed it simply: an experimental feature by an Iranian avant-gardist. That double identity – Iranian maker, Irish ground – would never leave the work.

A continuation of the exploration of human existence in an abstract register: minimal dialogue, a focus on mood and movement, the human animal observed as if for the first time.

Notable for its minimalist severity: a monologue delivered directly to the camera, shot in a single location – a film about the act of speaking and recording thought, pushing anti-narrative to an extreme. Rashidi has said it was made “in response to [his] short involvement with the Remodernist Film movement,” marking the point where he processed and moved beyond that influence to carve his own path.

In 2012 the productivity surged: three feature-length works in a single year, fiercely experimental and diverse in form. Their very titles – evoking hell, extinction and an ambiguous pronoun – point to their enigmatic, philosophical nature. HE, made with the Arts Council of Ireland’s Film Project Award and completed during a residency at The Guesthouse in Cork, is described by Rashidi as part of a continuum leading into the later films; all three draw on Homo Sapiens Project experiments and delve into existential and metaphysical imagery.

A direct offshoot of the Homo Sapiens Project – an instalment that grew into a full feature, and emblematic of Rashidi’s cannibal method: he has described how he would “re-ingest [his] older films, eviscerating and mutating them into HSP,” turning old footage into new creations. It is an oneiric, immersive experience that blurs documentary-style scenes of people and places with nightmare – distorted sound and images suggesting horror – and it bridges the early guerrilla filmmaking in Iran and the later Irish-set works.

One of the most acclaimed mid-career films, an epic experimental feature that exemplifies the mature style: “an epic cinematic journey through mysterious landscapes and environments populated by enigmatic characters who move and speak as if under hypnosis.” Constructed like a fragmented transmission, it feels “as if it has been created by an alien race in a language that we can follow and feel our way through but never fully comprehend,” speaking to the senses rather than the intellect. Critics noted that while it lacks a conventional plot, it maintains an internal “rhythm that gives it a narrative momentum” and even a sense of resolution. Throughout its length it weaves elements of science fiction, B-movie horror and detective-noir – all abstracted into eerie, hypnotic sequences that never settle into one genre.

The film premiered in the Irish Official Selection of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival, screened from DCP at the Light House Cinema with a public conversation afterwards. Interviewers observed “a sense of completeness on one hand and the opening of new doors on the other”; in Rashidi’s own reflection, it was – with Trailers – a culmination of experiments, after which he would “turn a page” and begin a new chapter.

An extraordinary three-hour film, perhaps the boldest experiment in pushing the limits of narrative and form: pointedly without dialogue for its entire duration, relying purely on imagery and sound to induce a meditative, trance-like state. The ironic title belies the content – rather than coming attractions, a cascade of scenes functioning as trailers for imaginary films or parallel realities. The collage is intense: colour-saturated sequences, strobing lights, sudden shifts from near darkness to blinding brightness, industrial noise against snippets of music. One reviewer catalogued “red glows, industrial noises, light on a woman’s naked body… visions of depravity, static sounds of voices, noises à la Twin Peaks… Nightmarish pulsations, impending doom… Count to three, psychedelic vibrant glows… Lost Highway meets Blue Velvet.”

Yet as chaotic as it may seem, Trailers has an internal structure. Its opening title – “a spectacular attraction by Rouzbeh Rashidi, Pictures of a far-off world” – signals the viewer to treat it as a cinematic theme park or hallucinatory journey; critics compared watching it to “lucid dreaming,” where images “jumbled out of order” still evoke emotional continuity. It is rich in intertextual reference – surrealist horror, erotic arthouse, Lynchian thriller – and it folds the collective’s own past into itself, incorporating music by Cinema Cyanide that remixes sounds from earlier EFS films. Nothing goes to waste; old footage returns as found footage. It premiered at the 61st Cork Film Festival – in the main programme, at Triskel Christchurch – funded by the Arts Council’s Film Project Award.

One of the most visually poetic of the films, set on the Irish seacoast. It follows a couple – played by the experimental filmmakers Daniel Fawcett and Clara Pais – wandering windswept islands and shores: a loose narrative of a relationship in crisis told in a hallucinatory, fragmentary manner. A critic drew parallels with Michelangelo Antonioni’s existential landscapes – characters as “figures of ambient feeling” amid scenery reflecting their inner void; the two protagonists appear as “abstractions of emotion on the verge of disintegration.” The imagery, tinted in pale blues and greys through those antique lenses, and the persistent sound of wind and waves create presence and absence at once; Rashidi gives the well-touristed Irish coast “a new lease of life,” rendering it ominous, “pulsating” with “intrigue and despair.”

The title itself hints at hauntology: islands of the mind as much as real places. “As an experimental filmmaker, I’m naturally drawn towards the overlaps between documentary and experimental cinema,” Rashidi has stated, and here the overlap is visible – real scenery and real bodies, surreal presentation. Commissioned under the Arts Council’s Reel Art scheme, the film premiered at the Audi Dublin International Film Festival at the Irish Film Institute with the director attending; it took the Best Feature-Length Experimental Film Award at the İstanbul International Experimental Film Festival; and in the summer of 2019 it received a two-week theatrical run at Kino Stüssihof in Zurich – the first proper cinema release of any Rashidi feature.

A hybrid of documentary and fiction reflecting on Rashidi’s own cinematic milieu – meta-cinema about the Experimental Film Society and the creative philosophies of its members, sharing its name with the Society’s book. True to the label, it interweaves candid footage, staged scenes and voice-overs: “a parade of visionary scenes” in an ornate style, opening with a sequence one commentator compared to Peter Greenaway’s A Zed and Two Noughts fused with the swirling music of a Michael Nyman or Bernard Herrmann score. Rashidi himself appears on screen – unusual for a director who stays behind the camera – alongside EFS collaborators, at times in a car against rear-projected landscapes, while “echoing voices philosophise about the world’s end.” As it progresses it grows increasingly abstract: images flicker like old celluloid, bodies appear and disappear, and three recurring women – “the witches of the damned, the angels of tomorrow’s dream” – laugh and taunt wordlessly at the camera.

Made possible by an Arts Council Open Call award of €54,500 and premiered at the İstanbul International Experimental Film Festival in November 2019, it can be seen as both a summary of the first two decades and a last flourish of the earlier style: a self-reflexive docu-fiction that closed the 2010s by examining the luminous void where the art resides – between reality and imagination, individual vision and collective filmmaking.

Rashidi’s creative process is marked by an exploratory use of film technology and a deliberate break with traditional narrative cinema. He is known for employing an unusually diverse array of imaging equipment and formats, from the latest digital cameras to obsolete analogue devices. His own inventory of the practice reads like a manifesto in the form of a list:

“Bold use of a wide range of moving image devices, including camcorders, digital cinema cameras, DSLR cameras, mirrorless cameras, drones and aerial imaging equipment, action cameras, consumer camcorders, surveillance video systems, telescopes, spotting scopes, night and thermal vision devices, analog video… and Super 8 film.”

In practice this means the tools are chosen for the particular texture each project wants. Some HSP diary films were shot on grainy VHS or lo-fi video for a raw, intimate feel; by contrast, Elpis and Dreaming Is Not Sleeping were captured in high-resolution 8K, allowing sweeping detail of landscapes. This chameleon approach stems from the belief that no technology is off-limits or superior – “I respect and enjoy working with all the formats and use them according to the specific project… A clever filmmaker will never restrict herself or himself,” he has said, criticising the false dichotomy of film versus digital. He “despises” debates over medium purity and instead exploits whatever cameras are available, even DIY techniques, to serve the vision.

One distinctive hallmark is the experimentation with lenses and optics. The antique nineteenth-century lenses encountered in Phantom Islands are specialist instruments – old portrait lenses from the 1800s that lack the crisp clarity of modern glass, producing soft edges, swirling bokeh and occasional distortions. Rashidi employs them for a “pictorialism aesthetic,” enveloping images in a patina that evokes early photography and literalises a recurring theme: seeing the present through the lens of the past. Beyond antique glass he tinkers constantly with in-camera effects – prisms, filters, handmade modifications. A skilled still photographer himself, he “fearlessly explores uncharted territory by experimenting with unconventional lenses and filters, even crafting his own” – a hands-on craftsmanship aligned with his admiration for directors like Fritz Lang, who saw themselves as craftsmen of cinema.

In sound, the approach is equally deliberate. Dialogue is sparse or absent in many works – a conscious break from the word-driven logic of conventional film, harking back to the silent era, when stories were told purely through image and music. By minimising speech he encourages viewers to read the film through its visuals and sonic atmosphere. In place of dialogue he constructs ambient soundscapes: natural sounds – wind, water, echoing footsteps – amplified to a hyper-real level; jarring bursts of noise rupturing the calm; music from experimental collaborators, including the collective’s Cinema Cyanide project, layered not to guide a narrative arc but to evoke an almost subconscious resonance. Sound is not subordinate to plot; it is an equal partner to the image in creating mood and meaning.

The editing privileges association and rhythm over continuity. Rashidi describes the process as reaching for a “ground zero of drama through the systematic removal and breaking down of any narrative structures” – excising exposition, backstory, sometimes even obvious cause and effect, to create a purer audio-visual experience. Yet this is not chaos: even without conventional plot, the features possess “tangible structure and precise rhythm.” He compares the structuring method to musical composition – “creating cinema with rhythm by structuring, juxtaposing, pacing, lights, shadows, flicker, sound and all the rest” – designing films like symphonies in which each sequence is a motif that builds and contrasts with others. “There is always a sense of some logical progression of sound, images and emotions, just like a symphony,” he explains. Sequences crescendo into frenzies of quick cuts and loud sound, then decrescendo into long takes and near silence; the modulation keeps the viewer engaged at a sensory level and makes each film an experiential journey rather than a story with a pay-off.

The toolbox of that journey is wide: rapid montage inherited from Soviet and avant-garde traditions; slow fades and superimpositions producing ghostly overlaps; deliberate non-linear sequencing. Trailers feels by design like reels spliced in random order that nonetheless build a surreal continuity through recurring symbols; Phantom Islands toggles between documentary stillness and bursts of hallucinatory montage, mirroring its characters’ minds. Rashidi is unafraid of testing endurance – holding takes well past conventional interest into meditative, hypnotic duration, an affinity with slow cinema that the recent essay films embrace fully.

Visually, the mise-en-scène returns again and again to the act of looking: characters filming or photographing, shots of eyes, mirrors and lenses – “visual optics galore,” as the essay Ruptured Ambience observes of Trailers, Phantom Islands and Luminous Void, as if the films were commenting on the very process of capturing images. The human body recurs in vulnerable or symbolic states – unclothed figures in nature suggesting a primal condition – presented with artful detachment, “abstractions of the conscious mind” rather than erotic scenes. And genre is everywhere in fragments: a documented love of horror and science fiction supplies iconography – strange devices, eerie atmospheres, noirish shadows – that never coalesces into genre plot. He has said he wants to “submerge [genres] totally into an experimental cinema” and “push these ideas to their extreme limits until the form itself begins to break down.” Critics catch the homages – Bergman’s intense close-ups, Godard’s colour flashes, Cassavetes’ raw intimacy – but the recombination is singular: an idiosyncratic film language immediately identifiable as his own.

The work can be situated within several broader movements, though it is confined by none of them. Rashidi is often associated with the Remodernist film movement – the international current that emerged in the early 2000s against postmodern irony, calling for a return to spirituality, sincerity and emotional truth in cinema. He has been cited as “one of the most prominent figures of the Remodernist Film movement,” and the films of the late 2000s and early 2010s – raw, earnest, low-budget, contemptuous of mainstream convention – exemplify that ethos, as does the movement’s emphasis on the transcendent in art. But the association has limits he drew himself: Closure of Catharsis was made after a brief involvement with the movement, a stepping-away from any formal manifesto to carve his own path. What remains is the Remodernist ideal of the artist as outsider: an uncompromising filmmaker pursuing a dreamlike cinematic experience by idiosyncratic methods.

Behind that sits the longer lineage of the avant-garde and underground. The refusal of commercial storytelling, the embrace of abstraction, the collective itself – all hearken back to earlier waves: the co-op movements in Europe, No-Wave New York, filmmakers banding together to share resources and exhibit outside traditional venues. The attention to the materiality of the medium – formats, grain, the visible substance of video – recalls the Structural filmmakers of the 1960s, though Rashidi is never devoid of content in their austere way; in blending formal experiment with subjective expression he is closer to Stan Brakhage’s merging of abstract imagery with personal vision, or to Chris Marker’s essayistic intelligence. The later turn to the essay film places him in dialogue with that tradition – Marker, Agnès Varda, Patrick Keiller – artists who blur documentary fact and poetic introspection, though his essays keep a stronger experimental edge: less linear, more opaque, using cinema as a medium of thought rather than storytelling.

The slow cinema of the 2000s – Béla Tarr, Tsai Ming-liang, Chantal Akerman – supplies a third context. The earlier work is often frenetic and montage-heavy, but the shift inaugurated by Elpis toward slower pacing, lingering landscape and reflective tone indicates a real affinity: after breaking narrative cinema into fragments with films like Trailers, Rashidi turned to duration and contemplation, synthesising slow cinema’s patience with his own hauntological imagery – a combination not common in that movement.

Culturally, he serves as a bridge between Iranian and Irish avant-garde cinema, two scenes not often linked. Iran has an experimental lineage – Kamran Shirdel’s films, Shirin Neshat’s video art – but Rashidi’s generation had little infrastructure for non-narrative cinema, which is what made the founding of EFS in Tehran so unusual an initiative. His subsequent life in Ireland, where he is now considered an Irish experimental filmmaker as well, makes him a case of transnational art: a Persian sensibility – the mysticism and poetry arguably drawing on Sufi poetic traditions – carried into an Irish context, and European art cinema inflected in return with Iranian culture and history. He has said that to cope with displacement he adopted cinema as his culture – effectively turning the medium into his nationality. In an age of mass migration, this cinema of exile speaks well beyond its maker: to anyone who has felt unanchored, or in between.

Teaching entered the practice late and then became central to it. The debut came in 2019, at UNATC I. L. Caragiale in Bucharest – Romania’s national film school – and everything that followed descends from that engagement. Within three years, teaching had become the second body of work: 22 engagements at 18 institutions across 9 countries, in person, invited, and – in every case where travel was involved – funded by the host.

The deepest of these relationships was with the Berlin Art Institute, where between 2021 and 2024 Rashidi designed two courses from scratch – one on-site, one online – developed them across successive editions, and taught several hundred students. It began in December 2021 with a lecture whose title condensed his whole position: Not a Life Filmed, But Filmmaking as Parallel to Life, and a Parallel Life. Online seminars and on-site masterclasses in Experimental & Personal Filmmaking followed through 2022, 2023 and 2024 – in his own summary, “a massive collaboration, deeply influential.”

Around that core, the map filled in. At the Universität der Künste Berlin he taught Experimental Filmmaking and Practice across three semesters – summer 2022, summer 2023 and winter 2023/24 – seven sessions each, within the university’s Studium Generale. The Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach invited an artist’s talk and then a four-day workshop in 2021 whose participants produced a portmanteau film, Exquisite Corps. He was lecturer and mentor on the Baltic Analog Lab’s film school in Riga in 2021; gave an online masterclass in Persian for the 38th Tehran International Short Film Festival that October, alongside Peter Tscherkassky, Klaus Stanjek, Michaela Grill, Thorsten Fleisch and Virgil Widrich; led a six-day intensive in Athens in 2022; a weekend workshop at Berlin’s filmArche in 2023; a masterclass and screening at Hypnos Theatre in Malmö in 2022; a workshop and screening at Alma in Sweden in 2024; and a festival masterclass in Tirana the same year.

The largest single engagement was in Kosovo. Having curated two EFS programmes remotely for Kino Armata in Pristina in 2020, he was brought there in person in 2022 – travel and costs covered by the Goethe-Zentrum Prishtina – for a seven-day workshop, five screenings and a major public lecture: a residency-scale act of transmission in a country his films had never previously reached.

The arc has a destination: a school of his own. The EFS Film School – the teaching arm he built out of the collective – now carries the masterclasses under his own roof: on-site intensives in Berlin, a masterclass with Tehran Contemporary Sounds whose participants’ work premiered publicly, and, from 2026, a live online course on the theories of personal experimental filmmaking. What began as a guest engagement in Bucharest has become the institution the nineteen-year-old in Tehran never had – built, characteristically, from scratch.

From 2021 the practice has been conducted between two cities. Rashidi works across Dublin and Berlin and moves continuously between them, and that sustained double presence has been an artistic hinge as much as a professional one. The Berlin thread had been laid years earlier – residencies at Lichtenberg Studios in 2015 and 2016, a third in autumn 2021 during which Elpis was developed on Arts Council funding, with Super-8 tests shot at the Wasserturm at Ostkreuz. What working between the two cities precipitated was the phase he calls his exploration of “slow cinema, poetic documentary techniques, and film essays” – and, alongside it, a new professional identity as a commissioned curator.

The title comes from Greek mythology – Elpis is the spirit of hope left in Pandora’s box – an apt reference for a film about hope and despair in the aftermath of war. Here, for the first time, Rashidi squarely addresses the Iran–Iraq War and its psychological impact on those who, like him, grew up under its shadow: “a poetic essay film about the effects of the Iran–Iraq War and its trauma and psychological impact,” told through the narration of a woman writing a book. That narrator, voiced by the German-Iraqi writer Claudia Basrawi, reads a first-person text on war, diaspora, love, alienation and displacement, set against “lavish, ethereal landscapes” filmed across Estonia, Latvia, Ireland, Germany, Hungary and Iran – places tied to conflict and exile. The juxtaposition of introspective narration with these grand natural spaces creates a meditative tone: autobiography fused with an outward-looking documentary register, the execution still firmly poetic and experimental. The director’s statement returns to Daney – cinema as the orphan’s refuge in the absence of homeland – and names the war’s “profound impact on [his] formative years” as the essence long “veiled” beneath the films’ enigmatic imagery. Funded solely by the Arts Council of Ireland, Elpis premiered at DokuBaku in Azerbaijan in 2023, closed the Berlin Revolution Film Festival as its German premiere, took a Special Mention from the student jury in Genoa, and travelled on through Argentina, Mexico, Istanbul, Cork and Copenhagen. One commentator called it the beginning of a “spiritually transformative path” continued in the next film.

The newest feature continues the essay form: “an introspective essay film exploring the relationship between memory, existence, and time, narrated by a spectral voice drifting through ancient ruins.” The ghost-like speaker guides the viewer through decaying historical sites, philosophising about perception and time; the work “contemplates perception, clairvoyance, and whether the present can be seen through the lens of memory, blurring the lines between past, present, and future,” its structure “deliberately fragmented, mirroring the non-linear nature of dreams and memories.” Rashidi calls it “a poetic meditation on the nature of human existence, perception, and the creative process itself,” describing his approach here as “a form of clairvoyance” – the mystical vocabulary again, now integrated into the film’s very form. It premiered at Kino Moviemento in Berlin in April 2025 with a public conversation, followed within weeks by Irish and Swiss premieres and, that November, an international premiere in the Experimental Films section of the 56th International Film Festival of India in Goa.

These years also made him a curator by commission. Since 2023 Rashidi has been the film curator and programmer of Tehran Contemporary Sounds, the Berlin-based festival of Iranian experimental music – commissioned across four editions and counting. Under the banner Cinematic Synesthesia he has conceived and hosted its cinema programmes: at Kino Central in 2023 – supported by the Goethe-Institut – and 2024, and at Moviemento in 2025, where the third edition premiered The Exquisite Project, a collective film made in the EFS Film School’s own masterclass. The curatorial identity was not new – he had curated a five-day programme at the Cinemateca Nacional del Ecuador in 2018 on Culture Ireland’s support, and two programmes for EFF Process in Riga the same year – but in Berlin it became a standing, commissioned role. The two cities have increasingly been brought into contact through the work itself – an Irish-founded body of practice presented to Berlin audiences, Berlin premieres carried back to Dublin screens, and occasions such as the German Irish Film Summit at Kino Moviemento in 2021 where the two scenes met directly. Teaching, curating, premiering, publishing: the practice that left Tehran as one person’s refusal now operates across both cities as a small institution with a filmmaker at its centre.

Two maps describe this career, and they must not be confused. The first is the map of the work: films shown in 48 countries, at festivals, museums, cinematheques and galleries – from the Cinematheque of Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art to the Österreichisches Filmmuseum in Vienna, from Brooklyn micro-cinemas to the cinematecas of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. Much of that map the films travelled alone, as experimental work does: prints and files crossing borders their maker never crossed.

The second map is the one that measures standing. Across 30 countries, institutions have brought Rashidi himself – invited, in person, and funded – to teach, curate, lecture, present and judge: 149 such engagements on the record, from the Dubai festival that covered a young filmmaker’s costs in 2004 to the Goethe-Zentrum that flew him to Pristina in 2022, from Culture Ireland sending him to Quito and Bogotá to the juries of Tirana, Kinoskop in Belgrade, Berlin Revolution and DEBUT22 in Klosters. The first map says the work travels. The second says institutions pay to put its maker in the room.

The complete evidence for both maps – every screening, festival, teaching engagement, curatorial commission, jury, award, grant, residency, exhibition and publication, with dates, institutions, cities and sources – is maintained in Works & Practice, a continuously updated register kept separately from this text. That separation is deliberate. This document is concerned with what the work is and why it is made; the register is concerned with where it has been and what it has done. Neither is a summary of the other – and this essay makes no attempt to duplicate what the register does better.

The work has accumulated a serious critical literature. The Serbian critic Nikola Gocić has written extensively on the Homo Sapiens Project; Donal Foreman surveyed the new Irish experimental cinema around EFS for Estudios Irlandeses; the anthropologist Hilary Leathem read the films’ hauntology for the Society for Cultural Anthropology; Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin examined the work in Filmkrant; Lukas Foerster wrote on Phantom Islands in Filmbulletin and, years later, on the Oberhausen programme that carried Rashidi’s work; Mónica Delgado covered it for Desistfilm. Film Panic magazine devoted a long interview to him in 2016 and an entire issue to Phantom Islands in 2018. The films reward this attention because of their intertextual density – the ghosts of cinema’s past living on in new forms – and because they ask to be studied as much as watched.

The academy followed. The Remodernist film movement received its first comprehensive history in a Sorbonne Nouvelle thesis by Florian Maricourt, written under Nicole Brenez – professor of cinema studies at the Sorbonne and curator of the avant-garde series at the Cinémathèque française – and Rashidi’s oeuvre stands at its centre; the full thesis is available in French. His work has likewise appeared in film journals, cultural-anthropology essays and scholarly dissertations on cinephilia, memory and identity in contemporary art.

A career of this shape resists summary, but its through-line does not. Rashidi has meticulously crafted a poetic, phenomenological cinema in which narrative is shattered and reassembled into evocative fragments, images are treated as living beings, and sound envelops rather than accompanies – a body of work balanced, on its own terms, between mystery and clarity. He keeps alive the flame of the avant-garde in an age dominated by commercial media, and he does not simply make films: he thinks through film, asking what it means to see, whether images can capture the unseen, and how an identity in exile shapes the art it produces. Twenty-five years in, the questions are still open – which is exactly how he wants them. The films do not mean; they are. And in their being, they quietly expand the possibilities of cinema, and of anyone willing to watch.

The Homo Sapiens Project (HSP) is the distillation and, in some ways, the culmination of my experimental film practice. I have always been committed to making deeply personal, formally experimental work that collapses the boundaries between alienated subjective perception and the inexhaustible mysteriousness of the moving image. I view cinema (in the broadest sense of the word) as a laboratory and my audio-visual works as experiments in which my own perception and inner life are employed as a ‘reagent’. My work begins with sound and image and works intuitively ‘outwards’ towards ideas. I generally utilise heavily unconventional screenplays or poetic texts, seeing the process of making moving images as exploration rather than illustration. My work is deeply engaged with film history.

HSP is an ongoing series of varied films that provides, first and foremost, a laboratory for experimenting with cinematic forms. Since its inception, HSP has experienced an organic metamorphosis, drastically mutating from cryptic film diaries and oneiric sketches to fully polished feature films. A ‘notebook’ – sometimes an oblique ‘diary’ – HSP radically challenges the traditional mode of filmmaking. It thoroughly explores the potential of filmmaking as an integral and ongoing part of daily life, as enabled by today’s technology. These works are created on low budgets, but they are far from being raw chunks of home movies. Each of them is crafted with great attention to visual qualities and with an idea in mind that, to a greater or lesser degree, makes a foray at the limits of cinematic expression.

The films produced range from cryptic, often darkly surreal, film diaries to impressionistic portraits of places and people, from found footage séances to semi-documentary monologues. Formally, they encompass everything from highly composed and distantly framed meditations to frenetically flickering plunges into the textural substance of moving images. They are often suffused with an eerie sense of mystery reminiscent of horror and classic Sci-Fi cinema.

The project HSP will lead to an incomprehensible and unpredictable outcome. Taken as a whole, this will be an opaque and mysterious project: not a life filmed, but filmmaking as parallel to life, and a parallel life a ‘thinking through’ of cinema that will test the limits of the medium to the furthest degree that one artist’s practice can encompass.

Cinema, for me, is not a means of representation. It is a means of attention. What I make is not an account of something that happened, nor an argument about the world, but a sustained act of looking that refuses to resolve into meaning. The moving image does not need to be redeemed by a story. It is already sufficient – already strange, already inexhaustible – and my task is to keep it from being explained away.

I do not begin with an idea and search for images to carry it. I begin with sound and image, and work outwards, and whatever thought arrives is a consequence rather than a cause. This is why I call the practice a laboratory and not a language. A language transmits what is already known. A laboratory produces what was not known beforehand, and often produces nothing at all, and the failures are not waste but the condition of the method. Perception is the reagent, and the only instrument I have is my own – which is why the work is inescapably personal without ever being autobiographical.

The films are made continuously, as a form of daily life rather than as a sequence of projects. Technology has made this possible in a way it was not possible for earlier generations, and I regard that as a philosophical fact rather than a practical one: when filming ceases to be an event and becomes a condition, the relation between a life and a body of work changes. The camera is no longer brought out for occasions. It is simply on, the way a mind is on.

I am interested in what remains when the human is displaced from the centre of the frame – not abolished, but decentred, observed from somewhere that has no stake in the observation. Much of what I make adopts a viewpoint that is not quite anyone’s. This is not misanthropy. It is an attempt to see the human form as an object among objects, with the same indifferent care one might extend to weather, or to a room, and to discover what becomes visible only under that indifference.

Nor am I interested in cinema as a vehicle for emotion in the ordinary sense, where feeling is manufactured to secure assent. I am interested in feeling as a way of knowing – in the disorientation, suspension and unease that a film can produce, and which constitute an understanding that cannot be paraphrased. If the work resists interpretation, that resistance is not obstruction. It is the content.

I have never regarded experimental film as a marginal or preparatory activity, a rehearsal for some larger and more legitimate cinema. It is the whole of the practice. Everything I have learned about images I have learned by making work that had no obligation to be understood, and I have come to think of that freedom not as a limitation imposed by circumstance but as the most serious position available to a filmmaker.

Rouzbeh Rashidi’s Homo Sapiens Project (HSP) constitutes a sprawling experiment in cinematic form and philosophical inquiry. In lieu of conventional narrative or teleological progression, HSP presents a cinema that interrogates its own ontology – the being and thought of the moving image – through radically non-linear montage, immersive sensory design, and alien perspectives. The project treats film not as a vehicle for storytelling but as a mode of thinking in its own right, probing what images do and are when divorced from human-centred chronologies and meanings. Indeed, as François Laruelle’s non-standard philosophy suggests, artistic practices like filmmaking can serve as “methods of thought” that are independent of traditional philosophy. HSP embraces this premise, unfolding as a singular cinematic thought form that engages ontological, phenomenological, and formal concerns at the limits of film. The following analysis reframes HSP through a philosophically attuned lens, eschewing historical narrative in favour of an inquiry into its aesthetic and conceptual structures. Key focal points include the non-teleological temporality of HSP’s elliptical montage, the ontology of the image as pure immanence, the decentering of human agency in favour of a “non-human” cinematic consciousness, and the practice of film as an affective mode of knowing. The analysis draws on a constellation of unconventional philosophers (Coccia, Laruelle, Negarestani, Silverman, Fisher) and experimental cineastes (Deren, Markopoulos, Grandrieux) to illuminate HSP’s radical poetic-philosophical project.

A defining feature of the Homo Sapiens Project is its abandonment of linear, goal-directed time in favour of non-teleological temporality. The films unfold through elliptical montages – sequences of images and events that often lack overt causal logic or narrative payoff. Instead of driving toward a conclusion or plot resolution, each segment of HSP explores temporal experience as open-ended, circular, or associative in nature. In this respect, HSP aligns with Maya Deren’s notion of vertical montage in poetic cinema. Deren famously distinguished between the horizontal development of narrative (where each scene propels the story forward) and the vertical accumulation of emotional or symbolic intensity in experimental film. In Meshes of the Afternoon, for example, Deren constructed a montage “held together by an emotion or a meaning that [the scenes] have in common, rather than by the logical action”. Likewise, Rashidi’s HSP favours associative rhythms and recursive motifs over linear plot progression. Scenes are linked by echoes of tone, visual rhyme, or affective undercurrent rather than by chronology or character-driven causality. This yields a temporality that is qualitative and intensive – time measured in moods or sensations – rather than quantitative or teleological. The viewer is invited to dwell in the duration of images, experiencing their recurring patterns and subtle variations, without the expectation of narrative closure.

Such an approach produces a cinematic time that is an-archic (without a ruling beginning or end) and often cyclic. Episodes of HSP sometimes loop or return to earlier imagery in a way that resists any final conclusion. One account of the project describes the viewer “stumbling through the dark forests of Rashidi’s Twilight Zone that is rife with Sisyphean loops” – an allusion to mythic endless repetition. These “Sisyphean loops” signal that the films do not build toward a teleological resolution but instead continually restart the journey of perception and thought. Instead of a narrative “arrow” of time, HSP offers time as depth, with layers of memory, dreams, and references coexisting in a perpetual present. In some instalments, a single quotidian situation is replayed with variations or interrupted by inexplicable temporal jumps, unsettling our usual sense of past and future. The editing frequently employs elliptical cuts, omitting intermediate actions and allowing temporal gaps. This technique – familiar in avant-garde practice as a way to compress or disjoin time – here becomes a philosophical device: it severs the expectation that each moment must lead to the next, thereby freeing each image to exist for itself. The result is a non-teleological montage in which sequences evolve according to an inner poetic logic rather than any external endpoint or story.

Crucially, the renunciation of teleology in HSP is not merely a stylistic play but carries ontological implications. By suspending the usual cause-and-effect narrative chain, Rashidi’s films foreground being over becoming. Each shot or scene is presented as a kind of self-subsistent reality – an occurrence whose significance is immanent, not deferred to some later payoff. This approach aligns with experimental film traditions that treat time as circular or wholly present. We might think of Gregory Markopoulos, who championed “film as the film” beyond storytelling conventions: he realised that the most profound cinematic experiences lay outside the linear narrative, asking, “Who can dare to imagine what a single frame might contain?”. Markopoulos’s rhetorical question suggests that a single image, in its vertical depth, may carry a world of meaning without requiring narrative sequencing. HSP operates in this spirit. Its elliptical montage opens spaces for contemplation within and between images rather than rushing the viewer along to the next plot point. Scenes often linger beyond the point of narrative necessity, drifting into oneiric or meditative temporality. Moments of apparent stasis or repetition become opportunities for the viewer’s mind to roam – to contemplate the image in its immediate affective and visual richness. In HSP’s temporal structure, meaning is not a destination but emerges in the act of viewing, in the span of time spent with an image. The absence of teleology thus invites the viewer into a more phenomenological experience of time, echoing Deren’s assertion that breaking from linearity encourages us “to contemplate the meaning and what [we’re] feeling” in each moment.

With narrative scaffolding stripped away, the image itself in the Homo Sapiens Project assumes an ontological primacy. Rashidi’s cinema asks: what is an image in itself when not subordinated to representation or story? HSP posits an ontology of the moving image as pure immanence, meaning that the image exists on its own plane of reality, co-extensive with the world rather than reflecting something transcendent or external. This view resonates with certain philosophical re-conceptions of the image in recent thought. For instance, Kaja Silverman argues that the photographic image is not a mere copy or index of reality but rather “the world’s primary way of revealing itself to us”. In Silverman’s account, an image originates in what is seen (the world’s visibility) rather than in the human eye; it is an “ontological extension” of the real, an analogy that shares being with its referent. HSP’s handling of imagery exemplifies this principle. The films present their visuals – whether a landscape, a face, or a texture of light – not as pointers to an underlying message or story but as things in themselves, worthy of attention in their own right. A dilapidated room bathed in eerie light, an abstract pattern of grain on celluloid, a human figure in extreme close-up – such images in HSP confront the viewer with their sheer presence, their being-there before any interpretation.

Emanuele Coccia’s philosophy of images provides another fruitful lens. Coccia suggests that images play a cosmological role, forming a continuum between living beings and their environment, thereby erasing any strict division between subject and world. According to Coccia, “media in the cosmos… produce a continuum in which the living and their environment become inseparable,” and thanks to images, “matter is never inert… and the mind is never purely interiority”. Images, in this view, are “true cosmic transformers” that bridge the spirit and matter. HSP’s corpus often literalises such ideas. The boundary between the camera and the world, or between the human observer and the environment, dissolves in these films. In HSP, the camera lens becomes almost osmotic: light, atmosphere, and movement flow into the recording medium, yielding images that feel less like representations and more like imprints of reality’s own processes. We frequently sense that the film is capturing not a human drama but a material or elemental one – clouds roiling, water shimmering, vegetation encroaching – as if the world is expressing itself through moving images. In one volume, for example, a tranquil park scene is filmed “through the eyes or rather, visual receptors of a mysterious being/entity who may be the incarnation of cinema itself”. Although we know Rashidi is behind the camera, the resulting images give the uncanny impression that cinema itself (or the world itself) is looking. The image here is immanent to an alien or non-human viewpoint embedded in reality rather than anchored to a human protagonist. This strategy emphasises that each image carries its own meaning as an emanation of an impersonal visual reality.

In treating images as immanent presences, HSP joins an avant-garde lineage that insists on the autonomy and depth of the cinematic image. Gregory Markopoulos’s aforementioned ethos of film as film – and his marvelling at what might be contained in a single frame – finds an echo in Rashidi’s frame compositions. The microscopic attention to the grain, colour, and duration of each shot in HSP suggests that, indeed, every frame teems with potential meaning. Markopoulos’s films of the 1960s, characterised by “ecstatic ‘chords’ and clusters made of the shortest visual elements” and an “eerie sense of colour and rhythm”, sought to liberate cinema from referential storytelling and let the image speak on its own terms. HSP adopts a similar stance: images do not illustrate a script or serve a narrative telos but instead form a poetic continuum of impressions and energies. The project’s use of visual abstraction, superimposition, and lens distortion further reinforces the notion of image-as-immanence. At times, we see figures and landscapes dissolve into grains of light or fields of colour, pushing the image to the threshold of the non-representational. These experiments invite ontological questions: Where does the image end and reality begin? Is the filmic image a window onto reality or a slice of reality itself? HSP seems to answer by collapsing the distinction – the image is a reality, one layer of the world entering into the sensorium of the viewer.

Rouzbeh Rashidi’s statements underscore the inexhaustible being of the cinematic image. He speaks of “the inexhaustible mysteriousness of the moving image”, implying that no matter how much one analyses or narrativises an image, something remains opaquely itself – an immanent mystery. This mysterious surplus is not a problem to be solved but the very point of HSP’s aesthetics. By dwelling on images that resist immediate intelligibility, the films cultivate a sense of immanence: the meaning of an image is not behind or beyond it but within it as a constant potential. We might draw a parallel to Nicole Brenez’s description of the work of another experimental auteur, Philippe Grandrieux. Brenez observes that Grandrieux’s filmic imagery “works to invest immanence under the species of sensation, of impulse”. In other words, his films plunge the viewer into the pure sensation of the image, treating the image as an affective reality rather than a signifier. She further notes that “the propensity of bodies to immanence” appears to be “the raison d’être” of Grandrieux’s films, meaning that the films exist to explore how bodily experience (of light, colour, movement) can be conveyed directly, without mediation by narrative or symbolism. HSP operates with a comparable mission. Across its many instalments, it consistently privileges presence over-representation: the grainy flicker of footage, the play of shadows in monochrome, the “beautifully composed images” inhabited by an enigmatic atmosphere – all these are presented as immediate realities to engage with, not code to decipher.

In sum, the ontology of the image in HSP is one of radical immanence. The cinematic frame is treated as a living cell of reality, a locus where matter and meaning coincide. The viewer is encouraged to encounter each image on its own terms, to sense in it the same depth and openness one finds when observing the world directly. In this way, HSP elevates the cinematic image from a vehicle of storytelling to an ontological event—a happening of being and perception that unfolds in the here and now of viewing.

Extending its exploration of immanence, Homo Sapiens Project also challenges the anthropocentric orientation of mainstream cinema. Rather than anchoring the films in a human protagonist’s gaze or a director’s didactic message, HSP often adopts what can be called a non-human perspective – a mode of cinematic vision and thought that is not centred on individual human subjectivity. In practice, this manifests as eerie, quasi-objective camerawork and narrative absence of any conventional “hero” through whom the audience experiences the story. Instead, the camera itself – or some unnamed presence behind the camera – becomes the protagonist. The series is pervaded by the feeling that an alien consciousness is observing human life and environments, collecting impressions without fully entering into human motives or speech. Indeed, one volume of HSP is explicitly described as “an anthropological study conducted by the very same alien factor whose presence is strongly felt throughout this peculiar anthology”. Here, the film itself behaves like an alien researcher: under “disturbingly motionless clouds” in a public park, everyday people (children playing, lovers talking) are filmed with a detached, inscrutable curiosity. The suggestion is that an “alien factor” – invisible yet palpable – is “collecting data for itself or maybe its superiors”. Such framing decouples the cinematic viewpoint from any known human identity, positing instead a non-human agency behind the camera eye.

This strategy aligns HSP with certain strains of philosophical thought that speculate about non-human thought or inhuman perspectives. Reza Negarestani has articulated a vision of “inhumanism” in which trustworthy rational agency is “not personal, individual, or necessarily biological”. In Rashidi’s view, reason can operate as an impersonal force, “a revisionary power” that transcends the human self-portrait and even works through non-human systems. Translating this idea to cinema, HSP tries to decenter the source of cinematic meaning from the human to the inhuman. The films often feel as if they are being thought by the camera or by the environment itself rather than narrated by a human storyteller. For example, in HSP (1), the kitchen interior is filmed so strangely that, as noted earlier, it appears to be seen through the eyes of “a mysterious being… who may be the incarnation of cinema itself”. This conjures the impression of cinema as a non-human thought form – as if the medium has its own alien cognition that perceives the world differently than we do. The human characters within the frame, including Rashidi himself in occasional appearances, are rendered as just one part of the image’s overall texture, not privileged bearers of meaning. In one sequence, Rashidi’s distorted figure walks across a red carpet under a fisheye lens, an image that is presented as a “conclusion” yet resists any personal narrative explanation. The effect is that even when the filmmaker enters their film, they become another object among objects, absorbed into the film’s immanent vision rather than serving as its controlling subject.

Through such techniques, HSP cultivates an experience akin to what cultural theorist Mark Fisher terms the eerie – “a failure of absence or a failure of presence” – that unsettles our assumptions about agency. Fisher defines the eerie feeling as occurring “when there is something present where there should be nothing or nothing present where there should be something” and notes that this perspective can “give access to the forces which govern mundane reality” by revealing the strangeness underlying the familiar. In HSP, the eerie arises precisely from the sense of an undefined presence behind the camera (something present that usually isn’t) and the notable absence of human-centred narration or explanation (something absent that generally would be there). The viewer becomes conscious of the unknown observer – that “enigmatic presence” which “perseveres in its intents to alienate the viewer from the worldliness of… images”. Everyday scenes are made strange; the banal is rendered in “hyper-realistic” detail yet feels unearthly as if filtered through intelligence that is studying it coldly or ritualising it. This estrangement of perspective has the paradoxical effect Fisher describes: it breaks the veneer of familiarity. It lets us see the reality onscreen as if from outside, “as outside of us, as inhumane and somehow alien”. In one HSP segment, for instance, long static shots of ordinary spaces (train stations, hotel lobbies) are held so that their normal human occupants almost disappear in the distance; the architecture and ambient noise come forward, evoking what Fisher would call “the eerie underside” of the everyday. We start to sense impersonal structures – of environment, of capital, of technology – ghosting the scene rather than empathising with any individual in it.

The non-human vantage of HSP is further reinforced by formal choices that deny viewers the usual anchors of human-driven cinema. Dialogue is minimal or entirely absent in most instalments; when present, it is often obscured, distorted, or treated as just another sound among the soundscape rather than a carrier of the plot. Faces of actors, including Rashidi, may appear but often without the cinematic cues that invite identification or emotional alignment (we might see a face in an extreme close-up, disembodied, or a figure in a long shot moving anonymously through a landscape). In place of narrative guidance, HSP supplies a rich, often disorienting audio-visual ambience that the viewer must navigate without guidance – much as an alien intelligence might survey human life with fascination but without insider understanding. We could say that HSP practices a kind of phenomenological dehumanisation, not in a moral sense but in a methodological one: it brackets the human as just one element of the lifeworld, not the measure of all things.

This brings to mind François Laruelle’s project of “non-philosophy,” which attempts to think from a radically non-hierarchical perspective he calls the vision-in-One, where no standpoint (not even the human philosopher’s) claims sovereign Truth. John Ó Maoilearca (John Mullarkey), interpreting Laruelle, notes that non-philosophy “opens the door for other methods of thought, including filmmaking and other artistic forms as thought”. HSP can be seen as an instantiation of this idea: a non-philosophical cinema that generates thought without centring on a human philosopher or protagonist. It is as if the films themselves think that by assembling images and sounds, they pursue lines of inquiry about perception, reality, and memory in an inhuman register.

In the process, HSP questions anthropocentric habits of seeing. It asks whether a film can express ideas that no character articulates and reveal truths that no human author dictates by letting the camera be a quasi-autonomous explorer of immanent reality. The answer HSP provides is implicitly affirmative: through its alien gaze and eerie detachment, it discovers a cinematic mode of thought that is parallel to human reflection yet not limited by it. This is cinema as a non-human thought-form – a reflective practice of the moving image itself, on its own plane of material and optical interactions.

If HSP posits cinema as a form of thought beyond the human, what kind of thought is this? The experience of watching the Homo Sapiens Project suggests that it is not a discursive or analytical thought but an affective and sensory one. In other words, HSP approaches film as an affective epistemology: it produces knowledge or insight through the viewer’s affective experience – through mood, sensation, and emotional intensity – rather than through exposition or argument. The films do not convey philosophical ideas; they embody them by inducing states of mind and emotion in the audience. This strategy aligns with a broader turn in experimental aesthetics towards understanding art as a way of knowing that is embodied and affect-driven. As such, HSP can be fruitfully read in dialogue with thinkers who have emphasised affect, sensation, and feeling as modes of understanding.

One immediately notable aspect of HSP is how it deliberately disorients the viewer and then uses that disorientation productively. The fragmentation of narrative, the non-human perspective, and the unpredictable editing all serve to destabilise our usual cognitive bearings. Yet this destabilisation is not total: Rashidi often introduces patterns, motifs, or even moments of humour and beauty that re-orient the viewer at a new level. The critic Nikola Gocić, writing on HSP, observes that “Our disorientation – an integral part of the filmmaker’s grand design – is alleviated by the playfulness of the moving images”. The films intentionally throw the audience “out of our comfort zone” with jarring cuts, uncanny imagery, or opaque sequences but then “comfort us back” with absorbing audio-visual rhythms or moments of meditative calm. In this ebb and flow of confusion and captivation, the viewer undergoes a kind of sensory training. HSP’s cinematic world often has the logic of a dream: discontinuous but held together by an atmospheric and emotional coherence. The viewer learns to feel their way through the film, trusting the affective cues (sound textures, colour tones, repetitions) as guides to meaning when rational plot cues are absent. In a sense, the meaning of HSP crystallises in these affective responses: the slow dread of a long take, the sudden jolt of a cut to an unexpected scene, and the sublime calm of a static landscape after a period of chaos. Such feelings are the content; they prompt the audience to reflect on states of being – e.g. what does it mean to experience boredom, anxiety, eeriness, or wonder in a pure form, outside of a narrative cause?

We can relate this to the idea that film can think by embodying thoughts as sensations. Maya Deren hinted at this when she suggested that poetic (vertical) cinema “encourages the viewer to contemplate… what they’re feeling” rather than following what is happening. In HSP, contemplation emerges from the viewer’s affective immersion. For example, a sequence may envelop us in droning ambient sound and dim visuals for several minutes, inducing a trance-like state. This trance is not mere ambiguity; it is pregnant with insight. It might evoke, for instance, the feeling of being lost in time or the awareness of one’s own act of seeing. At times, HSP explicitly plays with trance and dream states, echoing the legacy of trance-film in the avant-garde (as in the works of Deren or Anger). The goal, however, is not to mystify but to use altered affective states to probe reality from another angle. A viewer entranced by the film’s slow, rhythmic oscillations may find their mind drifting to new associations, perhaps realising connections between disparate images or sensing a hidden order in what first seemed chaotic.

The interplay of affect and understanding in HSP finds theoretical support in certain strands of contemporary thought. For instance, Mark Fisher’s analysis of the eerie (discussed above) implies an epistemic function for effect: the eerie feeling alerts us to gaps in our knowledge (a presence unaccounted for, an absence unexplained). It thereby directs us to deeper forces at work. In HSP, scenes of uncanny calm – such as an empty hallway with faint echoes or a field where an unseen figure might lurk – create a sense of expectation and uncertainty that prompts the viewer to question what is really occurring beneath the surface of the image. Fisher observed that by dwelling in such affective uncertainty, we break through the veneer of familiarity, in his phrase, and perceive structures (social, material, temporal) that typically remain hidden. Similarly, HSP’s affective estrangement from ordinary perception can yield flashes of phenomenological insight: we may become suddenly aware of the act of observation itself, of the materiality of time, or the contingency of human narratives in a vast, indifferent cosmos. These are not delivered as propositions but emerge tacitly, as realisations spurred by feeling. For example, an HSP episode might build mounting tension with horror-film techniques (ominous sound, the anticipation of a “jump scare”) only to withhold the expected release. The viewer, left in a state of unresolved tension, might glean that the actual subject is not a monster that finally leaps out (as in conventional horror) but the tension itself – the way the mind projects threats and meaning into ambiguous stimuli. In this way, the effect (fearful anticipation) becomes a means of knowing something about oneself and the medium: how cinema manipulates expectation and how the human mind grapples with the unknown.

Another theoretical perspective resonant with HSP’s affective epistemology is the idea, found in Laruelle-inspired film theory, that “photo-fiction” or film can be a test of one’s perceptual fidelity to reality. Laruelle speaks of photographic thinking as “first and foremost of the order of a test of one’s naïve self”. This cryptic phrase suggests that confronting the photographic (or filmic) reality without the a priori frameworks of standard philosophy is akin to a trial or experiment on our straightforward, natural attitude. HSP’s affective onslaughts and confusions test the viewer’s naïve habits of sense-making. By refusing easy narrative or moral cues, the films prompt the viewer to reflect on their own reactions and assumptions. One might emerge from an HSP screening with a new self-awareness: noticing how the mind tries to impose a story even on randomness or how quickly emotion attaches to abstract imagery. In this regard, HSP functions almost like a laboratory of perception. Rashidi has referred to using his “own perception and inner life… as a laboratory ‘reagent’” in creating these films, and by extension, the audience’s perceptions are likewise made into reagents in an experiment. The affective sequences act upon us, and our reflective awareness of those effects completes the experiment, yielding insight.

Moreover, HSP leverages what one might call the materiality of affect. The films often emphasise the physical aspects of cinema – grain, flicker, analogue distortion, droning or shrill sounds – which directly impact the viewer’s body. This haptic or visceral quality means that understanding of HSP can be corporeal. We feel the heaviness of a “bone-chillingly gloomy drone” in the soundtrack; we flinch at a sudden cut or the blinding flare of an overexposed frame. Such bodily responses are part of the meaning-making process. The notion of haptic visuality (as theorised by Laura U. Marks and others) is relevant: images that solicit the sense of touch or bodily sensation can convey knowledge that is not linguistic. For instance, HSP sometimes presents extremely grainy, decayed footage where the viewer almost “feels” the image as much as sees it – the decay of the film stock itself becomes an analogue for mortality and memory, grasped at an affective, pre-conceptual level. In Volume 8, as Gocić describes, the series “plunge[s] us into the world of the alternative reality of rapturous, Brakhage-esque visions,” where quotidian reality has been “absorbed” and only phantasmatic traces remain. Here, the effect might be one of rapture or vertigo, an overload of visual stimuli that destabilises our sense of what is real. Yet, in negotiating this overload, the viewer potentially gains a negative knowledge – an intuition of how much our sense of reality depends on stable signals and what happens when those signals are scrambled. This is consistent with certain modern philosophies that equate knowledge with the capacity to navigate uncertainty and chaos (e.g., the “catastrophic” knowledge in Nick Land’s geotrauma theory, although HSP remains more intimate and human-scaled in its experimentation than Land’s cosmic annihilations).

We can also return to Philippe Grandrieux and the idea of sensation as a form of knowledge. Grandrieux’s films (such as Sombre or La Vie Nouvelle) are frequently cited for their intense sensory assault and minimal dialogue, aiming to communicate through affect and corporeal rhythm. Brenez’s insight that Grandrieux invests in “immanence” through “sensation” suggests that the way an image feels can carry philosophical weight. In HSP, an entire epistemology is encoded in the patterns of affect. For example, the recurring motif of darkness punctuated by sudden light (scenes that go black and then burst into overexposure) seems to interrogate the very process of revelation and concealment. The viewer’s startled physiological reaction to brightness after darkness is the epiphany – a tiny enactment of moving from not-knowing to knowing or from oblivion to insight. Similarly, when HSP alternates between extreme long shots (distant, detached) and extreme close-ups (intimate, invasive), the jarring contrast feels like a question about perspective – the shock of being flung from an impersonal view of humanity to a viscerally personal one. The films thus use form to trigger feeling and feeling to provoke thought.

Finally, HSP’s status as an extensive series (hundreds of short films created over two decades) itself contributes to its affective epistemology. The sheer accumulation of episodes builds a kind of immersive encyclopaedia of moods. Watching HSP in aggregate is less about remembering specific events (there are few “events” in the narrative sense) and more about acquiring a tacit familiarity with the grammar of effect that Rashidi develops. Over time, one learns the “alphabet” of this cinema: a cut to black means X, a sudden ominous drone means Y, a lingering out-of-focus shot means Z – not in a fixed code-like way, but as recurrent invitations to certain states of mind. The project becomes a training ground for affective literacy, sharpening the audience’s sensitivity to subtle visual and auditory cues. In doing so, it suggests that cinema’s philosophical potential lies not only in representing ideas but in cultivating new perceptual capacities in the viewer. This is philosophy as a practice, analogous to how certain philosophical traditions (phenomenology, Zen Buddhism, etc.) see wisdom as arising from disciplined practice rather than abstract argument. Rashidi’s practice of filmmaking – iterative, exploratory, and attuned to minute affective textures – models an approach to knowledge that is experiential and processual. The films do not hand the viewer conclusions; they immerse the viewer in an evolving process of sense-making. The viewer’s ongoing engagement – including confusion, emotional waves, and moments of clarity – is the site of meaning. In this way, HSP exemplifies how an experimental film corpus can function as a living philosophical inquiry, one where affect and form guide us to insights about perception, self, and reality.

Rouzbeh Rashidi’s Homo Sapiens Project stands as a singular convergence of experimental cinema and philosophy—a cinema of immanence and thought that pushes the medium to interrogate its own boundaries. Throughout its extensive volumes, HSP pursues a radical project: to discover what film can think and feel when freed from the constraints of storytelling conventions and a human-centric perspective. We have seen how its non-teleological temporality suspends narrative finality in favour of an ever-unfolding present, thereby re-orienting the viewer to the qualitative texture of time. We have explored how its images assert their own ontology as immanent realities, engaging with contemporary philosophical notions that blur the line between image and world. We have considered its adoption of non-human or alien viewpoints, through which the camera becomes an impersonal consciousness examining the human form without – a move that resonates with humanist philosophies and yields an eerie illumination of the real. We have analysed HSP’s mode of affective epistemology, whereby the films impart understanding through the very emotions and sensations they evoke, turning the audience’s disorientation and fascination into tools of insight.

Crucially, HSP achieves all this without resorting to didactic voice-over or explanatory text; its method is formalist and experiential. In doing so, it exemplifies what one might call philosophy by other means: philosophy is conducted not in the language of propositions but in the languages of montage, lighting, sound design, and rhythm. It echoes the legacy of filmmakers such as Maya Deren, Gregory Markopoulos, and Philippe Grandrieux, who treated cinema as a fundamentally poetic and intellectual medium capable of articulating the ineffable. HSP carries that legacy forward into a new century, amplifying it with Rashidi’s unique sensibility. The project’s massive scope – comprising hundreds of films that form a single, evolving artwork – itself poses philosophical questions about totality and infinity in art. Is HSP a kind of open-ended Gesamtkunstwerk of the experimental moving image? Does its refusal to conclude (the series continued expanding over decades) suggest that the “limits of cinema” are indeed “not yet tested enough”? The final film of Volume 1 wryly implies as much, noting that even after a chain of introspective dreams, “the odyssey doesn’t end there because the limits of cinema have not been tested enough yet”. This sentiment encapsulates the spirit of HSP: it is an ongoing interrogation of cinema’s own possibilities – an artistic research program into what cinema can become.

In an academic context, one might situate HSP as a form of “film-philosophy” in the robust sense: not just films with philosophical content, but films that do philosophy. As John Ó Maoilearca writes, Laruelle’s conception of non-philosophy clears the way for creative forms, such as filmmaking, to function as modes of thought on an equal footing with theoretical texts. HSP steps boldly through that door. It operates as a laboratory of thought where each cinematic technique (cut, colour, sound, duration) is a piece of experimental apparatus, and each viewing is a new trial of perception and meaning. The knowledge it produces is non-propositional yet profoundly affecting – a kind of tacit knowing-how in place of knowing that. One doesn’t conclude an HSP film with a tidy message; instead, one emerges with one’s sensibilities altered, one’s attention sharpened to aspects of reality (and cinema) that previously went unnoticed.

Finally, the philosophical significance of HSP can also be framed in ontological terms: it interrogates the limit between film and life. Rashidi’s work often blurs the distinction between personal diary and abstract cine-poem, between documentation and hallucination. The series as a whole has been called a “film diary” and simultaneously compared to an “avant-garde horror” of metaphysical scope. In navigating these extremes, HSP asks whether filmmaking can be a way of life-thinking—a process parallel to living that reflects on existence through an audio-visual experience. It posits that cinema need not depict a philosophy from the outside but can generate a philosophy immanently through its form. In HSP’s montages, one senses a search for what Werner Herzog might call “ecstatic truth” – a truth that is not factual but experiential, arising from the convergence of imagination and reality on film. The Homo Sapiens Project, in this radically philosophical re-description, is not a set of films about Homo sapiens as a species or about Rouzbeh Rashidi as an individual, but rather a searching inquiry into what it is to be a cinematic Homo sapiens: a human being who thinks, dreams, and perceives through the moving image. In this way, HSP ultimately interrogates the limits of cinematic thought not to close them off but to expand them – to suggest that cinema can always think more, feel more, and reveal more as we venture further into its unexplored possibilities.

Such is the enduring philosophical provocation of Rashidi’s Homo Sapiens Project – a cinema that, in the most profound sense, is alive with thought.