Onsite Masterclasses

EFS Film School · On-Site Masterclass · Dublin

A five-day immersion in the study and the practice of personal, poetic, and experimental cinema — taught in person by Rouzbeh Rashidi, conducted as both an encounter and an invitation. Cinema here is approached not as a craft to be acquired, but as a mode of perception: a thinking that thinks in light.

I.An Invitation

Experimental and Personal Filmmaking is an intensive five-day on-site programme devoted to alternative cinema, artists’ moving-image work, and experimental film. It is conceived at once as an immersion and as an invitation — a sustained encounter with the history, philosophy, poetics, and creative methodologies of experimental moving-image practice.

Through screenings, lectures, discussions, and readings, participants engage with the ways in which filmmakers and artists have used film, video, and digital media to unsettle inherited forms, widen the expressive reach of the medium, and transform their perception of the world. We consider how major works of experimental cinema investigate the material and conceptual capacities of the moving image, and how such works continue to reshape what cinema may yet become.

Alongside close attention to image, form, and context, particular emphasis falls on the role of sound in deepening the affective and sensory force of these works. By studying the structure, texture, and intention of diverse experimental practices, participants come to a richer sense of the lyrical, the idiosyncratic, and the aesthetically radical possibilities of filmmaking. This inquiry serves not only as a critical and philosophical foundation, but as a practical point of departure for the making of new work.

II.The Moving Image Today

The course is especially concerned with the growing importance of personal and lyrical forms of moving-image practice in contemporary life. It attends to the paradoxical condition of the moving image now: omnipresent and yet insufficiently seen; deeply familiar and yet profoundly estranged. In response to the unsettled sociopolitical and audiovisual landscape of the twenty-first century, it approaches the moving image as a site of memory, of perception, of reordering, and of renewal.

III.Learning Outcomes

The course draws its inspiration from Rouzbeh Rashidi’s Homo Sapiens Project, an ongoing venture in cinematic experimentation evolving since 2000. Across many years this body of work has been repeatedly reinvented — shaped by processes of both radical transformation and deliberate reduction.

What began as a singular and intensely personal laboratory of experimentation has come to resonate more widely through its sustained engagement with existential experience, inner life, and the pressures exerted by broader social realities. From this foundation, the course offers outcomes at once practical and theoretical. Participants undertake research into specific filmmaking approaches, methods, and techniques, and this process culminates in the creation of both individual and collective moving-image works, made under close expert guidance. The aim is not only to deepen understanding, but to give direct, hands-on experience in the making of experimental cinema.

IV.The Artist and the Homo Sapiens Project

Since 2000, Rouzbeh Rashidi has developed a distinctive and radical practice in experimental moving-image work. His cinema is grounded in a deeply personal vision, transforming the ordinary people, spaces, and encounters of everyday life into a phantasmagoric journey that tests the limits of the medium’s expressive and transformative power. In this process, images become forms of memory, and memory becomes inseparable from the shaping of selfhood and reality.

The Homo Sapiens Project (HSP), an ever-evolving undertaking, stands as the most sustained expression of this process. Emerging first as a film-diary and a laboratory of cinematic forms, it has come to reveal an uncanny relation to the conditions of contemporary image culture and the escalating production of moving images in the present era. It foregrounds the existential force of personally generated images — their capacity to move through isolation, alienation, and crises of identity, and their power to reimagine space, memory, and time.

V.Who It Is For

The course is open to a wide range of participants: filmmakers, artists from other disciplines, creative practitioners, and anyone wishing either to form a new understanding of experimental cinema or to deepen an existing practice. Participants of every level of experience are warmly welcomed — some may already be established filmmakers; others may be meeting filmmaking as a serious practice for the first time. Neither is closer to the image than the other.

This is not a course in technique. It offers no instruction in the operation of a camera or the cutting of a sequence. Its attention falls elsewhere — on poetics, philosophy, intuition, and the slow forming of a personal method able to sustain a lifetime’s engagement with experimental film. Its ultimate aim is to make an intensely personal environment in which a poetic cinema may emerge. In place of technical instruction, the course places its trust in the intuition, inventiveness, and resourcefulness of each participant, working with the means already to hand.

What to bring

• A device capable of recording video — a smartphone or similar is entirely sufficient.
• Basic video-editing software, whether on a phone, a Mac, or a PC.
• Those who wish to work with more advanced cameras, software, or equipment are equally welcome to do so.

VI.Teaching Method, Topics, and What You Will Carry Away

Participants develop the methodological, lyrical, and intuitive capacities required to express themselves through sensory and audiovisual form. The tutor works closely with each student in a highly personal and unconventional manner, offering guidance in shooting, sound recording, editing, and the development of raw material into finished work. Whatever their starting point, participants are encouraged to reinvent and reimagine both themselves and their working methods, setting out toward a more deeply poetic vision of cinema.

Reference materials — films, essays, books, and selected web-based resources — serve as points of orientation throughout. Participants share their thoughts, concerns, ideas, and projects within a collective environment, in a spirit of openness and mutual engagement. The course opens onto a wide range of critical conversations surrounding the creation and circulation of contemporary experimental cinema, explored not only in theory but through practical exercises, so that they may be absorbed into each participant’s developing practice. The course also offers access to materials by internationally acclaimed artists associated with the Experimental Film Society.

Perhaps most importantly, each participant leaves having contributed to a collaborative film and to a carefully shaped collective cinematic project. These works remain as artistic traces of the experience, and as living points of reference within future audiovisual practice.

VII.The Programme and Its Method

Over many years, Rouzbeh Rashidi has developed and refined a singular approach to performative lectures, screenings, and discussions. These events have evolved continuously, reflecting an ongoing search for forms of teaching adequate to a cinema of inquiry, instability, and discovery. To encounter this work is to understand that exploration itself lies at the centre of his approach to filmmaking.

His work proceeds as a continuous movement of thought and creation, in which the fundamental questions of cinema emerge organically through practice. The performative lectures, then, are not fixed declarations. They are glimpses into a body of work still in motion — still gathering force, still opening onto new possibilities. As Rashidi writes:

“I embarked on my filmmaking journey in the year 2000. From day one, I was consumed by a singular concept: exploring what cinema could represent in the new millennium. This question has been a driving force, propelling me to experiment and scrutinise consistently within my filmmaking laboratory. While I may not fit the traditional definition of a teacher, at my core, I am a filmmaker and nothing more.

Nonetheless, I impart my ideas and filmmaking techniques to provide context and support for both my work and the work of others. Moreover, I find immense value in developing literature and teaching methods that provide insight into my craft.”

VIII.The Five Days

IX.Practical Details