By Rouzbeh Rashidi A Response to Bijan Moosavi’s How Decoloniality and Identity Politics Failed Me Completely Bijan Moosavi’s recent essay, How Decoloniality and Identity Politics Failed Me Completely, published in Triple Ampersand, struck me with unusual force. It did so not because I recognised my own artistic method in Bijan’s, but because I recognised my…
By Rouzbeh Rashidi Tehran Contemporary Sound (TCS) is an annual Berlin-based festival and platform that showcases avant-garde and experimental music from Iran’s contemporary scene, engaging both artists in the Iranian diaspora and those in Iran. Over six editions to date, TCS has expanded from purely musical performances into a multifaceted event, including experimental cinema, sound…
By Rouzbeh Rashidi We Were Living a Perpetual Cinematic Moment Last night, I attended a musical performance titled Frequencies of Displacement, curated by my colleague and friend, Behrooz Moosavi, as part of a newly initiated project called Taqato. The term Taqato derives from Persian, signifying “the point where lines meet” or “intersection”—an apt metaphor for…
Personal Note: Drawing on the spirited Q&A that followed the Berlin premiere of my experimental feature Dreaming Is Not Sleeping on 20 April 2025—ably moderated by my colleague and co-conspirator Daniel Zander—I have allowed myself to invent an article, or perhaps a fever-dream diary, of that night. This narration is filtered through an alternate persona,…
By Juliette Verbeeck Like a half-remembered reverie glimpsed through shadow and light, Rouzbeh Rashidi’s Dreaming Is Not Sleeping weaves an intricate tapestry where existential longing converges with poetic cinema. As fleeting and enigmatic as the illusions conjured in Alexander Sokurov’s filmic oneiric realms, Rashidi’s latest work expands upon his enduring fascination with the ephemeral nature…
By Nadin Mai I remember … it was raining blood. He had tears in his eyes. My grandfather sat in front of my camera. He had just turned ninety and spoke, with difficulty, about his experience as a soldier in World War II. He would die less than two years later, with a lighter conscience,…
By Cristina Álvarez López & Adrian Martin Elpis marks a new path in the filmmaking trajectory of Rouzbeh Rashidi. Almost completely erased: people, bodies, figures – which is surprising, coming from an artist who has previously invested so much creative energy into the visualisation of human presence and performance. Now, there is mostly landscape, often…
By Nikola Gocić One of the most prolific auteurs of the last two decades, Rouzbeh Rashidi has transmuted his art practice into a state of being, his pulse attuned to twenty four frames per second, his soul possessed by the restless specters of cinema whose wild and arcane nature he has never bothered to tame…
By Bartol Babić Vukmir The following is a translation of an article first published in issue 106 of Croatian Film Chronicle (Hrvatski filmski ljetopis). “It’s nice when you can’t see anything, when everything is black”, admits one average person to another as they are “driving” in a car with a third, while the light pouring…
By Peter Larkin Rouzbeh Rashidi has amassed a prolific body of work since 2000 when he founded Experimental Film Society in Tehran. Based in Dublin since 2004 the Iranian-Irish filmmaker has produced 11 features and numerous shorts. With generous funding from The Arts Council of Ireland over the years Rashidi has developed a vision akin…
By Tony McKibbin While watching Maximilian Le Cain’s The Cloud of Skin various things may pass through one’s head that have little to do with the story the narratively expectant viewer might be looking to find. What those thoughts might be will depend partly on how immersed one may become in the experience, or how…
By Jesse Richards First of all I’d like to note that I am not a critic in ANY sense, but I have been so inspired by this film by Rouzbeh Rashidi that I feel compelled to speak out in support of it. Any failure to convey something accurately enough about this film lies solely on…