About

Experimental Film Society · About

Origins: Tehran, 2000–2004

Experimental Film Society was founded by Rouzbeh Rashidi in Tehran in 2000. It began at the turn of the millennium, in a country passing through a brief season of cultural opening while still governed by strict censorship — a place where avant-garde cinema had almost no permission to exist. EFS took that condition as its first teacher. What could not be said plainly was said obliquely: in metaphor, in abstraction, in images that carried their meaning beneath the surface. The tension between artistic freedom and its restriction entered the work at the root, and constraint became part of the Society’s grammar rather than its opposite.

The founding also belonged to a larger turning. As digital tools placed the means of production and distribution in individual hands, experimental cinema began to slip loose of its old Western capitals and appear in places it had rarely been sought. Tehran was such a place. Iranian cinema was celebrated internationally in those years, but the recognition belonged to another cinema; for experimental filmmakers there was no infrastructure, no funding, no route to an audience. EFS answered by building its own spaces, from the ground, outside every official channel.

For its first four years — the Iranian Phase — the Society was an embryonic collective: local to Tehran and its surroundings, poor in means, absolute in intention. It sought out the few filmmakers who shared its conviction, experimented with whatever formats and techniques came to hand, and set down the principles and methods it has never abandoned. Its aesthetic and its philosophy took form there, shaped equally by Iranian cinematic tradition and by the international avant-garde — developed under pressure, and made for no market. By 2004 the groundwork was laid; what had begun in one city was ready to leave it.

Ireland, 2004–2017

In 2004 EFS relocated to Ireland — one instance of a wider migration of artists in the new century, and a decisive turn in the Society’s history. The move opened networks, resources, and audiences that had been unreachable before, and admitted new aesthetic influences and new collaborators into the work.

Across the following thirteen years — the Irish Phase — EFS became a dispersed constellation of filmmakers across Ireland: geographically scattered, pragmatically connected, in constant collaboration. It was the most productive period the Society has known. Films multiplied year on year; public screenings and exhibitions multiplied with them; EFS curated its own festivals, symposia and workshops; and new platforms and partnerships carried the work to wider audiences. Ireland entered the films — its landscapes, its culture, its communities of filmmakers — while the Society learned to work within the country’s structures of public arts funding and, from Ireland’s position in Europe’s cultural networks, to reach the world.

Metamorphoses: 2017 to the Present

In 2017 EFS became a film company. The change made possible work of a new ambition: professionally funded projects, a catalogue of acclaimed experimental feature films and exhibitions, and two books — Luminous Void: Experimental Film Society Documents and Luminous Void: Twenty Years of Experimental Film Society — setting down the Society’s history and philosophies. The phase reached its zenith in a major exhibition at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin, Luminous Void: Twenty Years of Experimental Film Society, marking twenty years of the Society.

The history of cinema keeps a strange law. Its collectives and movements burn intensely for ten or twenty years, and then they stop: production ends, voluntarily or organically; the group dissolves; and the legacy passes to critics and cinephiles, who uncover and excavate it with archaeological devotion, while the films linger in the culture like phantoms, haunting the audiences who continue to watch them. Nearly every collective and movement in the intricate history of filmmaking has obeyed this law.

EFS declined to. In 2024 it restructured itself completely and entered its International Phase as an Autonomous Entity — abandoning the traditional forms of the film collective and the film company alike in favour of a self-governed artistic doctrine. It has renounced fixed national identity and geographic location and operates on a global scale, devoted to a small number of meticulously selected film projects and to the growth of EFS Film School: a film academy built on alternative and unconventional methods of teaching. In formalising its teaching, the Society became more than a producer of experimental cinema — a keeper of knowledge, and a shaper of the practitioners to come.

Philosophy

EFS is devoted to personal, experimental cinema, and its films begin where explanation ends. Their materials are mood, atmosphere, and the rhythm of images: cinema addressed to the body before the mind. In the understanding that phenomenology has given the arts — that perception is lived before it is thought — a film is not a story delivered but an experience undergone. The films pass beyond traditional narrative structure into the sensory and affective dimensions of experience; the viewer is not led through a plot but placed inside a field of sensation, an active participant, engaged through the body’s own responses.

Sound and image are composed together until the senses cross. What is heard alters what is seen; what is seen changes the weight of what is heard — a deliberate pairing, in the manner of synaesthesia, where one sense ignites another. This interplay is never accompaniment and never ornament: it is structure, integral to the film’s impact, immersive and disorienting by design, and it gives the work its abstract and experiential character.

The Society keeps its door open to unpredictability, to disorder, and to the unfamiliar. That openness has an ancestry in Surrealism, whose automatism surrendered creation to the unconscious in order to escape rational control. EFS does not surrender. Chance is invited in and then commanded: improvisation and randomness operate inside a deliberate framework, as instruments of a larger vision — controlled disruptions, harnessed and shaped until they serve the work’s thematic and sensory ends. Where conventional cinema guards itself with structure and predictability, EFS admits chaos precisely as far as the conception requires, and no further. In doing so it takes its place in a long avant-garde argument over intention and accident, perception and chance — and answers it not in theory but in practice, with films that blur the boundary deliberately and reach the viewer on sensory, affective and intellectual levels at once.

Lineage

The cinematic language of EFS filmmakers is a synthesis with deep roots. From silent cinema it takes the haunting, alchemical plasticity of the image — the conviction, carried from Jean Epstein and Germaine Dulac and their idea of photogénie, that the camera transfigures whatever it regards, and that a film can speak with full power without a word of dialogue. From the first decades of the medium — Méliès, the Lumière brothers, Dziga Vertov — it takes the pioneering sense of boundless possibility, and the will to overturn every convention of narrative and form. From the classic art film — Bergman, Antonioni, Tarkovsky — the certainty that cinema can bear philosophical and existential weight.

To a rarer line the debt is particular. The classics of experimental cinema are, for the most part, short films; EFS has made the feature-length film its principal medium. In this it looks to the experimental and alternative filmmakers of the feature form — Marguerite Duras, Jean-Luc Godard, Raúl Ruiz, Werner Schroeter, Jean Rollin, Alexander Sokurov — whose impact on EFS filmmakers has been immense.

Science fiction and horror run through the work as vehicles for existential questions — the tropes of genre bent toward metaphysics, in the tradition of the philosophical genre cinema the Society’s filmmakers admire. Cosmic and occult themes stand as metaphors for the unknown: an attempt, in the lineage of Kenneth Anger and Stan Brakhage, to give visual form to the ineffable and the transcendent, to what exceeds representation. And from experimental music and the other avant-garde arts EFS takes its interdisciplinary character — the cross-pollination between cinema and its neighbouring forms that has marked every avant-garde of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The Films

EFS filmmakers do not merely experiment with cinema; the medium works on them as they work upon it, and the films are made in that exchange. The results are deeply immersive works that traverse territories at once unsettling and familiar, against the grain of what audiences are trained to expect.

In these films, cinema appears as a vast and diverse medium that contains, metaphorically, all conceivable galaxies and forms of life — entities that can be partially perceived but never entirely comprehended. Like the universe it reflects, cinema exceeds understanding, and offers more than narrative.

The ideal EFS film would be stripped of dialogue, of imagery, of sound: pure cinematic essence, resisting the senses themselves. Such a film is rarely practicable. But its principle governs everything the Society makes: a film should not mean but be. Meaning is never fixed and never delivered; it is left open — to personal interpretation, or to direct sensory encounter, as before an abstract painting, where significance belongs to whoever stands in front of the work. Refusing defined plots and character arcs, the films exist as existential experiences: their value lies not in being understood but in being undergone. In this, the Society’s work is also a sustained inquiry into the nature of film as art — cinema as an ontological presence, something that is, and asks to be met beyond understanding.

Reach

EFS has supported the production of numerous no-budget and low-budget feature films and an extensive range of short films — innovation practised deliberately in conditions of scarcity, where constraint sharpens rather than limits. Beyond production, the Society has worked as a curator: screenings of its filmmakers’ work at home and internationally, carrying experimental cinema past local audiences and into cross-cultural dialogue with the global avant-garde community.

Among its initiatives is The Luminous Void Experimental Film Festival, which gathers the diverse voices of contemporary experimental cinema: curated screenings, live performances, and discussion — a meeting-place where filmmakers, scholars and audiences confront the work and one another, and where the creative process and its theoretical context open into critical discourse. Through such initiatives, in Ireland and worldwide, EFS has laboured for the sustainability and growth of experimental film culture on a global scale — so that innovative work reaches the audiences capable of meeting it.

The Filmmakers

Across its history, EFS has drawn to itself a wide network of filmmakers and artists from across the world. Some passed through briefly; others have remained through every phase of the Society’s evolution. Duration was never the measure of significance. Each brought a distinct artistic perspective and a distinct craft, and each altered the trajectory of the whole — its aesthetics, its methods, its ethos. The Society is the accumulation of those alterations.

A curated selection of films by Maximilian Le Cain, Atoosa Pour Hosseini, Michael Higgins, Rouzbeh Rashidi and Jann Clavadetscher is available on the Society’s own video-on-demand platform, for streaming and download. The selection is curatorial in principle: a representative cross-section of the stylistic and thematic range of EFS filmmaking, serving at once as a historical record of the Society’s collaborations, a living point of access to the work, and a resource for study. It is neither exhaustive nor closed; the catalogue grows and is re-curated as the work continues.

The Luminous Void Ouroboros

EFS has survived by metamorphosis. Its essence — fluid, adaptable, profoundly elastic — has given it, again and again, the means of self-reinvention. Its philosophy is a resilience of a severe kind: the Society pushes its boundaries to the point of shattering its own core, then compels itself to rise from the ashes, so that it may continue to exist and to grow. It understands itself as a pulsating entity journeying into the existential void and the oblivion of the cosmos — the luminous void ouroboros: the serpent that consumes itself to renew itself; life, death and rebirth joined in a single circle. The history of cinema grants every collective an ending. EFS has chosen the circle instead.