Out of This World: Trailers at Cork Film Festival
A preview of the world premiere of Trailers at Cork Film Festival, presented above in facsimile with a full transcription below
By Max Le Cain · Irish Examiner · 29 October 2016
Since arriving in Ireland from Iran in 2004, Rouzbeh Rashidi has been a driving force in the Irish experimental film scene. The founder of the Experimental Film Society collective, Rashidi is a prolific filmmaker with thirty features and several hundred shorts under his belt. Friend and frequent collaborator Max Le Cain looks forward to Rashidi’s underground epic Trailers, which receives its World Premiere at the Festival.
One thing which can be said with certainty about Rouzbeh Rashidi’s underground epic Trailers is that it is quite unlike anything else you will see in Cork Film Festival this year. In fact, it might be unlike anything else you’ve ever seen. Or even unlike anything else ever made, except perhaps Rashidi’s previous feature Ten Years in the Sun. What these films share that is so unique is a combination of qualities more frequently associated with experimental film — a rejection of traditional narrative, an intimately and sometimes opaquely personal vision in which cinema feels closer to private ritual than mass entertainment — with the cosmic scope of a science fiction epic.
Although made on a minuscule budget, Trailers is a big movie and a big movie experience. Its perspective is truly alien. Vignettes of human frailty and sometimes quite graphic sexuality are played out as if witnessed by an extraterrestrial race monitoring us from across space and, perhaps, time. Seen from this distance, the human species appears absurd, bizarre and tragic but never less than engaging. Looking at ourselves through non-human eyes lays bare the fragility of our race of frightened, desire-driven bipeds scuttling in pursuit of our little fetishes while hopelessly adrift in the vast darkness of the universe.
As a member of Experimental Film Society, a performer in Trailers and a frequent collaborator of Rouzbeh’s in many capacities over the years, I can attest that he’s not afraid of attempting what many would dismiss as impossible. It might reasonably have been thought impossible that a film would ever be made that could be described as an ‘underground epic’ without any hint of irony. Yet Trailers is that film.
Trailers, Sunday 13 November, 20.15, Triskel Christchurch. Max Le Cain is a filmmaker, cinephile and film critic living in Cork City.
Originally published in the Irish Examiner, 29 October 2016, page 10, ahead of the world premiere of Trailers at Cork Film Festival. Restored and republished as a web article for EFS Publications in 2026; the clipping is preserved in facsimile above and in the EFS archive.
