Seven Days of Chaos

Crystal Christ I: La Pasarela de la Muerte

Based on an installation by Alberto vev

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.

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

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

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.

Only Human

A tale of people unfolds under the night sky. These doomed couples and lost individuals begin journeys and attempt to find resolution in their lives. Love is observed from a distance, sadness is in the air. With little sympathy for the loss and destruction caused to the characters, the stories progress and become neatly woven into a minimalistic portrayal of modern life.

Occurrences of Questionable Significance

When forest animals invade our cities, the world is in disarray. Office vixen Fiona struggles with her banana phone addiction. Will she succumb to it? Temperamental bunny Barbara only gives her stag sugar daddy Nestor his special massage, after he dines her and plays the big spender. This obscure short film pinpoints postmodern tropes of consumerism, eroticism, and art with an homage to the theater stage and references to literature. This work uses a fantasy language and needs no subtitles.

A Little Love

Through interspersed conversation and prose, this experimental documentary follows a poet and a neuroscientist as they explore the definition of love, what it means, and why it matters.

From Dark Matters

An intimate reading experience of voice messages from my grandmother‘s sleepless moments. A portrait of personal memory as it is reimagined and lingers for an instant. My phone camera documents wandering figures by a lakeside at night. Across from the lake, the sight of the dissolving cityscape appears to be both infinitely close and extremely remote. This film attempts to reconstruct the forgotten and the marginalized parts of individual beings in the scope of time. The film explores what’s beyond the visual expression and flows out of the flat screen to co-inhabit the space of the audience’s reality. The viewers would find themselves roaming through the ontological existence of film, confronted with sound, light, darkness, time and rhythms, transitioning between positive space and negative space, and approaching the very ambiguity of memory.