A tale of people unfolds under the night sky. These doomed couples and lost individuals begin journeys and attempt to find resolution in their lives. Love is observed from a distance, sadness is in the air. With little sympathy for the loss and destruction caused to the characters, the stories progress and become neatly woven into a minimalistic portrayal of modern life.
TRAILERS unites the most personal and experimental aspects of underground filmmaking with a scope that is as cosmically vast as a science fiction epic. Rashidi’s ongoing exploration into the nature of cinema sees a group of characters adrift in space, each locked into their own sexual rituals while a cataclysm of universal proportions unfolds. Humanity has become a mysterious burlesque show for alien eyes: the gaze of the film camera. This visionary spectacle uses multiple formats and visual textures in weaving an erotic anti-narrative suspended in its own space and time.
HE, the third work in the ongoing collaboration between Rouzbeh Rashidi and actor James Devereaux, is a troubling and mysterious portrait of a suicidal man. Rashidi juxtaposes the lead character’s apparently revealing monologues with scenes and images that layer the film with ambiguity. Its deliberate, hypnotic pace and boldly experimental structure result in an unusual and challenging view of its unsettling subject.
Homo Sapiens Project (201) was completed in 2021 as part of re-envisioning and restructuring Rashidi's filmography. This nineteen-hour experimental feature is constituted from many feature films produced between 2002 to 2014. These experimental features were made as a type of test or trial experiment. Rashidi assembled the films from footage accumulated over the years, archival footage, found footage and rushes donated by his close collaborators.
Weird Weird Movie Kids Do Not Watch The Movie is the second collaborative feature film between Rouzbeh Rashidi and Maximilian Le Cain. This hypnotic, visually and sonically immersive exploration of a haunted space unfolds in two parts. In the first, a woman (Eadaoin O’Donoghue) dissolves her identity into the ghostly resonances she finds in the rooms and corridors of a sprawling, atmospheric seaside basement property. In the second, a man (Rashidi), existing in a parallel dimension of the same space, pursues a bizarre and perverse amorous obsession.
A man (James Devereaux) sits on a park bench talking to the camera, trying to weave together a thought that won’t cohere while commenting on passers-by, his ‘guests’… Mysterious images intervene, overturning the serenity of the park-bench monologue. Rouzbeh Rashidi’s feature proves as engaging as it is elusive.
Three witnesses to the invasion. Three accounts. Are they observing the same thing? Were there any warning signs? And, after all they’ve seen and heard, are they even competent to offer a reliable report? The purpose of this film is to demonstrate that an effort to construct functions known not to exist may on occasion produce interesting frauds.
“Persistencies of Sadness & Still Days”, is a four hour feature film by Maximilian Le Cain and Rouzbeh Rashidi. Structured in two sections or ‘takes’ of two hours each, this dream-like, experimental project offers two complementary explorations of cinematic form that skirt around possible narratives, ducking through a series of fluctuating audio-visual categories and intensities.
An assortment of obscure private obsessions, conspiracies and perversions flicker on the verge of incoherence against the context of vast cosmic disaster in Rouzbeh Rashidi’s boldest film to date. This sensory onslaught combines a homage to the subversive humour of Luis Buñuel and Joao Cesar Monteiro with the visionary scope of a demented science fiction epic.
HSP 100 is a portrait of experimental filmmaker Maximilian Le Cain. As Le Cain discusses his life, work and relationship with cinema, Rashidi envelops him in a hallucinatory audio-visual ambiance that ultimately results in a poetic dialogue with the ideas and feelings he expresses.
There is no escape… From one side of the globe to the other, there is no escaping the faces, the visions, the ever-watchful camera. There is no escaping the mask, there is no escaping the resonating echoes of images and sounds that cross each other over time. There is no escaping the cinema. There is no escaping the terrors of the mind. “A mysterious loner, perhaps a poet, journeys through a series of uncanny surrealistic landscapes with an unclear purpose. His adventure is divided into three sections. The main theme of this experiment is to compare the eerier qualities of different landscapes and interpose the characters within them, elaborating the project’s ongoing preoccupation with extracting sinister moods from ordinary settings. In a way, these can be seen as experimental horror films in which an atmosphere of dread is evoked and sustained without the expected narrative trappings.”
A relationship between a man and a woman discloses during the course of the film.
Little is known of Jean Speck (1860-1933) beyond the fact that he opened Zurich’s first cinema. Rouzbeh Rashidi and Jann Clavadetscher consider the flittering black and white ghosts and shadows that he left in his wake in their phantasmagorical experimental feature film. This journey through a cinematic night probes the very essence of the cinematic image.
Self Decapitation is a Janus-headed self-portrait by Rouzbeh Rashidi and Maximilian Le Cain in which death and desire each take possession of this film in two parts. The ambiguities of inhabiting a human body are conjured by way of film technology in its faults, faulty memories and false promises. There is no escape from its haunting – except perhaps to haunt it in turn…
An intimate stream of memories reaching out across time and space, taking on a uniquely experimental form that cuts the viewer adrift in a weave of old footage rising to the surface of consciousness like a dream.
A bleak, cryptic vision of life in contemporary Iran that eschews overt social commentary in favour of a very personal vision of stifled lives. Directed remotely by Rashidi from Ireland over Skype, the making of this unique film reflects the alienation it so compellingly portrays.
Surreal and mysterious, in equal parts absurd and intense, Mutual Admiration Society is part of the noted multi-film collaboration between actor James Devereaux and experimental filmmaker Rouzbeh Rashidi. Based entirely around a silent, tour-de-force one-man performance by Devereaux as a man who appears to be haunting and threatening himself, Mutual Admiration Society uses startling visual techniques and editing rhythms to create a claustrophobic hall of mirrors with Devereaux’s tormented protagonist at its centre.
A film of a dying world populated by mythic creatures and spirits, our personal meditation on nature and the environment captured on Super 8 film.
Haunted by the memory of a blind woman with visionary powers, a man revisits the sites of their love affair. Rather than unfolding as a traditional narrative, Le Cain’s first feature is an immersive and dreamlike exploration of memory and vision. Shot in a series of time-warped Irish locations the otherworldly atmosphere is intensified by composer Karen Power’s compelling soundscapes.
In a remote rural estate house, a woman sleeps, she is alone. It’s a time not far from the dawn of the moving image, the obsessed and wealthy Dr. Epstein engineers a number of scientific experiments. He subjects his adopted children, Pete and Re-Pete, along with his darling flapper, Baby Dee, to his various scientific tasks. Things take a decidedly strange turn when Epstein makes a deal with some shifty-looking vagabonds. On doing so he opens a door to the unknown, ruptures the fabric of time and unleashes a shadow-like character bent on reducing all those he encounters to dust.
