Rouzbeh Rashidi
EFS Film School · About
Rouzbeh Rashidi (born Tehran, 1980) is an Iranian-Irish experimental filmmaker, artist, writer, curator, and tutor.
He began making films in 2000 — the year he founded the Experimental Film Society in Tehran — and has worked from Dublin since 2004. Across more than two decades he has created a vast and singular body of work spanning feature films, film essays, experimental videos, installations, writings, lectures, and the ongoing Homo Sapiens Project. His films have been shown from the Berlin International Film Festival to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran, latterly with the support of the Arts Council of Ireland.
I.A Cinema That Begins in Absence
His cinema begins in absence. The love of film grows from a void — no country, no culture, no settled belonging — and from that void he made cinema his only home: a fluid country, answerable to no nation. War and dislocation simmer beneath the surface, never named. The work hangs between clarity and mystery, the real and the surreal, where everything and nothing coexist.
It is a cinema concerned with exile, memory, perception, hauntology, mysticism, the spectral life of images, and the philosophical force of personal filmmaking. Over the years his work has moved through no-budget experimentation, underground cinema, feature-length poetic structures, diary forms, essayistic landscapes, and expanded audiovisual systems.
He is a medium; filmmaking, a séance — a portal between universes, through which energies are transmitted. An attempt to trap the images and the presences that cinema, of all forms, holds so well; for cinema is an art of ghosts and shadows. Antiquated lenses; a self-imposed austerity; the image clouded until the invisible — the atmosphere of a place, the persistence of a dead moment — becomes palpable.
A film should not mean but be. Its worth lies not in what it depicts, but in the hidden intensity of what it depicts — sensation, not statement. He asks of cinema a poetry, never a message; without the capacity for poetry, he has said, he does not know what cinema is for.
II.The Homo Sapiens Project
At the centre stands the Homo Sapiens Project: the film-diary kept since 2000, now hundreds of instalments deep. It is not a work to be admired but an open laboratory — the truest record of a life given wholly to the image, and a body of evidence for what a practice can become when it is sustained, without interruption, across a lifetime.
III.A Pedagogy from Within the Work
As a tutor, Rashidi teaches from within this practice. His pedagogy is not separate from his cinema; it arises from the same questions:
What is an image? What does cinema do to memory? How can one create a body of work outside inherited forms? What remains when narrative, meaning, and conventional explanation are no longer the centre of the film?
Since 2019 he has taught experimental filmmaking across Europe and beyond — among other places the Universität der Künste Berlin and, between 2021 and 2024, the Berlin Art Institute, his students drawn from all seven continents. Through EFS Film School he has developed courses, masterclasses, lectures, workshops, and mentoring structures for students and artists internationally. His teaching is philosophical, poetic, practical, and deeply personal — a form of guidance designed to help each participant approach the cinema that belongs to them alone.
EFS Film School is the form that teaching now takes: a lifetime’s practice, gathered into a place where it can be passed on.