Testimonials
EFS Film School · About
What follows is not a list of endorsements, but a passage through the lived experience of the school — recounted by the artists and filmmakers who have studied here, in their own words.
EFS Film School, led by the filmmaker Rouzbeh Rashidi, is an immersive education in personal and experimental cinema — a practice devoted to creativity, attention, collaboration, and a deeper relation to the moving image. Below, past students and alumni speak for themselves.
I.Entering the Work
Most arrive uncertain of what to expect, and find a space of artistic seriousness and openness — often the recognition of a teaching long needed.
I cannot recommend this enough. Those five days with Rouzbeh Rashidi taught me so much about who I am — not only as an artist but as a person. This is for whoever wants to expand the way they think of cinema in a radical way, and to explore a more personal, guttural kind of filmmaking. Thank you so much for such a transformative week. It will not be forgotten.
Your lectures and the films — and the selected reading texts, too — confirmed for me that enrolling in this course was one of the best choices I could have made, and the curriculum I have needed for so long.
Thank you for such a wonderful and enriching course. It was truly a pleasure to be part of these sessions, and to engage with your insights on personal and experimental filmmaking.
Thank you, Rouzbeh Rashidi, for your experimental calm and your inspiring teaching.
Thank you so much for your wonderful programme. It was such a pleasure to have access to your teaching, the class group, and the interesting films you set for us to view.
Thank you very much for such an inspiring and wonderful experience.
II.Expanding Perception
Cinema here is not a craft to be acquired but a way of perceiving. Again and again, students describe a widening — of the mind, the senses, and the very idea of what a film can be.
For six weeks I took part in the Experimental and Personal Filmmaking course. Each session expanded the mind, the consciousness, the vision. I have seen so many experimental films in these weeks — it is exciting and frightening at once, the fear and excitement of not knowing what you will see, hear, or experience. It is thrilling to realise how personal one’s perception of a film is, with all the senses. As Rouzbeh says, filmmaking is like living, or living is filmmaking. The philosophy and the depths are endless and limitless — an infinity of creation, and an exploration of the senses.
It was a consciousness- and sensory-expanding week. Thank you, Rouzbeh Rashidi.
This course put form on the kind of thinking and feeling I have wanted to engage with around filmmaking. Across the six weeks you danced the lines between the intellectual, the creative, the insightful, the thoughtful, and the vulnerable in a way that is rarely done.
Such an eye-opening experience. Thank you for this, Rouzbeh.
What a fun and unusual week. Thank you, Rouzbeh Rashidi, for bringing your life learnings and your honesty. I can’t wait to explore what was discovered — and how great to meet such a diverse group.
So much to take from this experience.
III.Recovering the Personal Voice
The teaching turns each maker back toward their own instincts — unblocking a stalled practice, validating a way of working, or drawing out a first film that could come from no one else.
Thank you for such an inspiring filmmaking course. The content and resources have been incredibly valuable, and they gave me the boost I needed to start working with the image again after feeling creatively stuck. The lectures helped validate my approach to filmmaking, and I found the emphasis on repetition particularly insightful.
Thanks very much for the incredibly useful and insightful course — I have found it deeply rewarding. My aim has been to re-engage with film in a new way, and your course has really helped me along this path.
I visited his class last year and made my first experimental film. I cannot recommend his class — and meeting Rouzbeh — highly enough.
Thank you so much for these past weeks. It has truly been inspirational and exciting to work on my own projects with the topics you spoke about in mind.
IV.The Collective Experience
For all its solitude, the work is also shared. Something forms between those gathered — friendship, generosity, a common attention — that lingers well past the final day.
Such an inspiring experience. Thank you, Rouzbeh — I’m glad to have had this shared experience, and to have made friends along the way.
Thank you for your thoughtful teaching and engagement this week. It was wonderful to learn from you and from all of the other students; this was a very special class.
I absolutely loved my time in this class, with so many inspiring souls. Thank you, everyone.
Thank you for your input, your ideas, your comments, and your vision of experimental film. It was a very inspiring course, and a great exercise.
Audio-visual Berlin — artists, poets, creative souls. Highly recommended.
Weeping in departures. Thank you, Rouzbeh; thank you, everyone.
V.After the Course
The teaching does not end when the sessions do. Long afterwards, students return to the notes, the films, and the questions, and find them still alive.
It really was a switch-in-brain-path, new-lens-on-making, portal-to-another-plane sort of experience for me. I still come back to my notes often when I am working on new films, or making them up in my head. I was deeply affected by your devotion to the act of film, by the idea of collaboration behind its making, and by the spaces you created for conversation, discussion, and — most importantly — sharing.
Thank you for the incredible course, the learning experience, and the certificate of completion. Honestly, I will be sitting with this course material for months and years to come — and I intend to keep learning from you in the future.
I can’t believe how far we got in five days. Thank you again.
The whole course was amazing and fascinating. Thank you.
VI.A Living School of Personal Cinema
And sometimes the response is simply gratitude — brief, immediate, and unguarded:
These are not testimonials to a course completed, but to a relationship with cinema altered. EFS Film School is not a training programme; it is a living, artist-led space for personal, poetic, and experimental cinema. For those seeking not merely a course but an awakening of their own artistic potential, these voices speak for themselves — of perception widened, of a personal language recovered, of friendships made, and of a way of seeing that does not close when the days do.
If these voices speak to something in you, the school teaches in four forms — each a different distance to the same fire.