Rouzbeh Rashidi · Filmography

Homo Sapiens Project

Authorial Statement

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.

The Volumes

The Homo Sapiens Project is presented here in twenty volumes, together with the standalone features HSP (100) and HSP: There Is No Escape from the Terrors of the Mind (Homo Sapiens Project 151), and the two monumental culminating works, HSP (200) and HSP (201). Each has its own dedicated page.