Cosa C'è Lelio?

Please Don't Go Looking

This experimental short film by Iain Delavan serves as an abstract, yet harrowing expression of his struggles with Post-traumatic stress disorder, due to his repeated childhood sexual abuse. Iain was diagnosed with PTSD in March of 2022, and this film boldly represents the continued battles that Iain must face every day, such as severe depression, self-harm, panic attacks, flashbacks, nightmares, suicidal ideations, and other painful symptoms.

Indwell Extinction of Hawks in Remoteness

An intimate stream of memories reaching out across time and space, taking on a uniquely experimental form that cuts the viewer adrift in a weave of old footage rising to the surface of consciousness like a dream.

Hades of Limbo

A bleak, cryptic vision of life in contemporary Iran that eschews overt social commentary in favour of a very personal vision of stifled lives. Directed remotely by Rashidi from Ireland over Skype, the making of this unique film reflects the alienation it so compellingly portrays.

Mutual Admiration Society

Surreal and mysterious, in equal parts absurd and intense, Mutual Admiration Society is part of the noted multi-film collaboration between actor James Devereaux and experimental filmmaker Rouzbeh Rashidi. Based entirely around a silent, tour-de-force one-man performance by Devereaux as a man who appears to be haunting and threatening himself, Mutual Admiration Society uses startling visual techniques and editing rhythms to create a claustrophobic hall of mirrors with Devereaux’s tormented protagonist at its centre.

Persistencies of Sadness & Still Days (Take 1)

“Persistencies of Sadness & Still Days”, is a four hour feature film by Maximilian Le Cain and Rouzbeh Rashidi. Structured in two sections or ‘takes’ of two hours each, this dream-like, experimental project offers two complementary explorations of cinematic form that skirt around possible narratives, ducking through a series of fluctuating audio-visual categories and intensities.

Jean Speck (1860-1933)

Little is known of Jean Speck (1860-1933) beyond the fact that he opened Zurich’s first cinema. Rouzbeh Rashidi and Jann Clavadetscher consider the flittering black and white ghosts and shadows that he left in his wake in their phantasmagorical experimental feature film. This journey through a cinematic night probes the very essence of the cinematic image.

Dogville

A woman on the run from the mob is reluctantly accepted in a small Colorado community in exchange for labor, but when a search visits the town, she learns that their support has a price.

Philippe-Alain Michaud, le réel traversé par la fiction

To be in Venice and see the architecture of New York, to perceive in a painting by Tintoretto the birth of animated images, to look at the burlesque Cretinetti as the ancestor of montage - so many shifts, displacements, and striking telescopings that Philippe-Alain Michaud proposes in this film dedicated to him. To follow this art historian, curator of the cinema collections at the Centre Pompidou, is to go from the oriental carpet to the film, or from the first fireworks to the cinema. And everywhere the animation of the images - projections of Antony McCall, or of Paul Sharits, Column without end of Brancusi, Pasolini's Accatone - everything moves! Under the tutelage of Aby Warburg, the great art historian of the early twentieth century, precursor of iconology and image comparison, to whom Philippe-Alain Michaud was the first in France to devote an important essay, eleven images are placed on the table to describe the singular journey of this art historian.

Homo Sapiens Project (200) (2000-2020)

Homo Sapiens Project (200) was completed in 2020 as part of the 20th anniversary of Experimental Film Society. This eight-hour experimental feature is constituted from short film experiments made between 2000 to 2010. These films have already undergone many metamorphoses over the years. They were always restless wandering spirits seeking a permanent place of rest but so far without success. Each section of Homo Sapiens Project (200) was made under the unique condition of living out a form of subtle therapeutic practice. Collectively they reflect major life-changing events, formalistic mutations and thematic shifts within Rouzbeh Rashidi’s filmography. In spite of this, they could not find the peace of a satisfactory final shape. Indeed, they are about peace, something that rarely (if ever) exists within Rashidi’s work. But now, after twenty years of roaming the subconscious, they have come to rest in a permanent retirement in one world, one very personal floating planet.

Homo Sapiens Project (201) (2002-2021)

Homo Sapiens Project (201) was completed in 2021 as part of re-envisioning and restructuring Rashidi's filmography. This nineteen-hour experimental feature is constituted from many feature films produced between 2002 to 2014. These experimental features were made as a type of test or trial experiment. Rashidi assembled the films from footage accumulated over the years, archival footage, found footage and rushes donated by his close collaborators.

Sagesse Celestiale

The Conversation

Stop-motion experimental short where two men communicate with one another, talk on the telephone, smoke cigarettes, and contort themselves. Produced 1987 and released in 1988 on the VHS compilation Fat of the Land, released via Factory Records video imprint IKON. "Here is the first tape of a new British cinema which should be seen by everyone who loves film. The official British cinema is truly dead, alive only in admens bought dreams. This is the way to go."- Derek Jarman

Manolo Kabezabolo

Documentary about Manuel Méndez, better known as Manolo Kabezabolo, a punk artist who in a somewhat implausible way has crossed time, space and fashions, without giving up his essences and principles.

Proximities

Proximities focuses on the trope of the Malay Boy found in the works of Singaporean artist Cheong Soo Pieng (b. 1917-1983). It attempts to locate the Malay male in art history while unpacking underlying systems of power that have shaped and naturalised the understanding of difference.

Running Fields III

Twenty images of a camera running next to a chemical platform and capturing abstract light throught improvised gestures and asymmetrical motion

The Phantom Harp

Super 8mm, 21 min., b&w, music by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma.

Los demenciales chicos acelerados. Pt 2: Barcelona y alrededores

Albert

Capturing life through the lens of a dream, Albert explores the evocation of the subconscious mind through the vivid visualism and dynamism of images.