Rouzbeh Rashidi

Rouzbeh Rashidi — Experimental Film Society

Biography

Rouzbeh Rashidi (born Tehran, 1980) is an Iranian-Irish experimental filmmaker, artist, writer, curator, and tutor.

He began making films in 2000 — the year he founded the Experimental Film Society in Tehran — and has worked from Dublin since 2004. Across more than two decades he has created a vast and singular body of work spanning feature films, film essays, experimental videos, installations, writings, lectures, and the ongoing Homo Sapiens Project. His films have been shown from the Berlin International Film Festival to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran, latterly with the support of the Arts Council of Ireland.

His cinema begins in absence. The love of film grows from a void — no country, no culture, no settled belonging — and from that void he made cinema his only home: a fluid country, answerable to no nation. War and dislocation simmer beneath the surface, never named. The work hangs between clarity and mystery, the real and the surreal, where everything and nothing coexist.

It is a cinema concerned with exile, memory, perception, hauntology, mysticism, the spectral life of images, and the philosophical force of personal filmmaking. He is a medium; filmmaking, a séance — a portal between universes, through which energies are transmitted, an art of ghosts and shadows. A film should not mean but be: its worth lies not in what it depicts, but in the hidden intensity of what it depicts — sensation, not statement.

Since 2019 he has taught experimental filmmaking across Europe and beyond — among other places the Universität der Künste Berlin and, between 2021 and 2024, the Berlin Art Institute — and through EFS Film School has developed courses, masterclasses, lectures, workshops and mentoring for students and artists internationally.

Films within EFS