Press

Dreaming Is Not Sleeping draws its audience into a realm that hovers between lucidity and inner vision — one that challenges our understanding of time, memory, and the flickering boundary between reality and nocturnal imaginings.

Juliette Verbeeck · EFS Publications · 2025writing on the film for EFS Publications

The human condition is both examined and interrogated by Rouzbeh Rashidi in his experimental essay film Dreaming Is Not Sleeping.

Matthew Briody · Film Ireland · 2025in Film Ireland, Ireland’s national film magazine

The future of cinema calls to us from the past …

Cristina Álvarez López & Adrian Martin · EFS Publications · 2023film critics and video essayists, co-editors of LOLA

Elpis is a form of consciousness, an alternate state, a traumatic remnant that seeks to come to terms with what has been and with what is today.

Nadin Mai · EFS Publications · 2023film scholar; founder of The Art(s) of Slow Cinema

In Phantom Islands you will find transmogrifications of Marguerite Duras, Jean Epstein, and Andrej Żuławski, the film being dedicated to all of them, but that list can be expanded to include, for example, Hollis Frampton and Sergej Parajanov.

Bartol Babić Vukmir · Hrvatski filmski ljetopis · 2021in the peer-reviewed Croatian Film Chronicle

It’s more like the preconscious of film: all those thoughts, impressions and sensations that are not buried deep or hidden away, but rather present somewhere in my mind yet just out of reach, jostling around all together, like an amorphous cloud slowly dripping and filtering into my consciousness.

Adrian Martin · EFS Publications · 2019film critic and theorist, co-editor of LOLA

Die Inseln lösen sich nur widerstrebend und nie vollständig aus der Unschärfe, aus einer amorphen Visualität, einer Ursuppe der kinematographischen Potentiale. — The islands emerge only reluctantly, and never completely, from the blur; from an amorphous visuality, a primordial soup of cinematographic potential.

Lukas Foerster · Filmbulletin · 2019German film critic

Phantom Islands proposes, for its viewers, a hypnagogic delirium. The hypnagogic state is virtually a definition, or a theory, of cinema itself.

Adrian Martin · EFS Publications · 2018film critic and theorist, co-editor of LOLA

The value of Phantom Islands relies not only in how Rashidi works the abstraction of the island, but also in the apparition of two young experimental filmmakers as actors, whose gazes is the rarified sieve that governs it all.

Mónica Delgado · Desistfilm · 2018editor of Desistfilm

In its real-world setting the film also contains aspects of Michael Powell’s The Edge of the World, another pioneering pseudo-documentary text that also took place on an island that felt haunted by some spectral presence or other.

Alice Butler & Daniel Fitzpatrick · aemi · 2018co-directors of aemi

Rashidi’s entire oeuvre reflects this sense of alienation and estrangement — a preoccupation with apparitions is nothing more than a certain cognizance of the fact that ghostly presences hinge on (dis)connection.

Hilary M. V. Leathem · The Society for Cultural Anthropology · 2019

A cinéaste plasticien or ‘cinemist’ like José Val del Omar, Rashidi has created a complex and protean body of work, poetic and mysterious, largely unexplored.

Théo Deliyannis & Florian Maricourt · Université Paris III – Sorbonne Nouvelle · 2014from Nicole Brenez’s seminar, Sorbonne Nouvelle

Snow turns into noise and noise into snow. The two image systems come to merge, past and present meeting in a symphony of noise, played before our eyes by a noise musician of images.

Théo Deliyannis & Florian Maricourt · Université Paris III – Sorbonne Nouvelle · 2014from Nicole Brenez’s seminar, Sorbonne Nouvelle

Rouzbeh Rashidi is a ‘cinemist’, a term borrowed from visionary Spanish experimental filmmaker, theorist and inventor José Val del Omar that combines in one the words ‘cineaste’ and ‘alchemist’.

Esperanza Collado · Experimental Film Club · 2013artist and theorist, author of Paracinema

Rashidi’s work contains more mystery.

Tony McKibbin · (An)Other Irish Cinema · 2010essayist and lecturer, University of Edinburgh

The Iranian-Irish filmmaker Rouzbeh Rashidi actually seems to get closer to this fine line between “experimental” and “narrative” than any other filmmaker known to me. And this is no mean feat — it requires great nerve and good verve.

Bill Mousoulis · EFS Publications · 2010filmmaker; founder of Senses of Cinema