Mentoring 

EFS Film School · Study · Mentoring

A one-to-one accompaniment, offered by arrangement and in limited number: a sustained, bespoke encounter with an artist’s work — its method, its difficulties, its instincts, and its unresolved questions.

I.A Practice Built Around the Artist

Over many years, Rouzbeh Rashidi has mentored artists, filmmakers, moving-image practitioners, writers, and interdisciplinary creators. The relationship has taken many forms and arrived by many pathways, but it is never a fixed or generic service. It is, each time, a bespoke encounter with a particular practice — shaped around its project, its questions, its limitations, and its artistic ambitions.

II.How Mentoring Begins

Mentoring usually begins in one of two ways.

Through a funded application

Often an artist makes contact while preparing a grant application, a bursary proposal, a project award, a residency application, an exhibition proposal, or a film development plan, and is seeking an experienced mentor to guide them through the process. Where appropriate, Rouzbeh provides a letter of support for the application. Should the funding be awarded, he then designs a tailored mentoring programme built around the specific nature of the artist’s practice — their project, their questions, their limitations, and their ambitions.

Through private arrangement

In other cases, artists approach independently, using their own resources, because they are developing a film, an installation, an exhibition, a gallery or museum presentation, a moving-image work, an essay film, or an experimental cinematic project, and they require sustained intellectual, artistic, and philosophical guidance. Whatever the route, the mentoring is shaped to the artist before it — to their work, their method, their instincts, and the questions they have not yet resolved.

III.Not Technique, but Vision

This is not mentoring in technique. It offers no training in camera operation, editing software, production management, equipment, lighting, or sound recording, and no instruction in post-production workflow or the practical mechanics of filmmaking as a craft. Its work takes place elsewhere — in the deeper territory of cinema as an art of perception, thought, rhythm, duration, intuition, poetic structure, philosophical inquiry, and personal vision.

For the true techniques of cinema are not, finally, technical procedures. They are ways of seeing, hearing, thinking, sensing, assembling, waiting, failing, returning, and discovering form.

The mentoring concentrates, then, on the philosophical, poetic, lyrical, theoretical, historical, and cinephilic dimensions of the work. It helps an artist clarify the inner necessity of a project, understand the deeper logic of their images, strengthen their relationship to cinematic form, and uncover the aesthetic, conceptual, and emotional architecture already latent within the work.

IV.Cinephilia as a Living Companion

A great part of this process is cinephilia. Rouzbeh brings a lifelong and extensive knowledge of cinema into the relationship, offering carefully chosen films, filmmakers, and movements, alongside books, essays, theoretical texts, visual references, and historical contexts that can open new pathways for the artist.

These are never decorative recommendations. They are living companions to the work — films and texts that can help an artist understand their own project more profoundly, finish a difficult film, reimagine an exhibition, resolve a structural problem, or recognise the hidden lineage to which their practice belongs.

V.The Questions That Guide the Work

The task is not to train an artist toward a template, nor to fit a work to a model that already exists. It is to accompany them through the more difficult, and more essential, questions:

Mentoring is offered in limited number, when capacity allows. Each programme is designed for the single artist, and the single project, before it.