Rouzbeh Rashidi
1980 (44 года)His films are inspired by, and constructed around, images, locations, and characters and their immediate situations. The stylistic elements that make up his distinctively personal film language include the use of natural light and single light sources, professional and non-professional actors, slow-paced rhythms, abstract plots, static shots, and minimal dialogue. He employs a wide range of different formats and devices to make his films, including video (digital and analogue) especially DSLR cameras (achieving complex visual effects through an elaborate mixture of filters, lenses, and in-camera color grading), Super 8mm, portable lightweight personal cameras (such as GoPro, webcam, and mobile phone). His consistently low-budget work is entirely self-funded and made with complete creative freedom.
Cremation of an Ideology
Rouzbeh Rashidi
Rouzbeh Rashidi
The enclosed, private space a man occupies is penetrated only by images brought from across distances by the internet. Space, distance and memory collapse in this haunting meditation on absence and virtual presence in the 21st century.
Cremation of an Ideology
Only Human
Rouzbeh Rashidi
Atoosa Pour Hosseini, Farzad Fahim
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.
Only Human
HSP: There Is No Escape from the Terrors Of the Mind
Rouzbeh Rashidi
Dean Kavanagh, Rouzbeh Rashidi
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.”
HSP: There Is No Escape from the Terrors Of the Mind
Animal Kingdom
Dean Kavanagh
Cillian Roche, Anja Mahler
Earth. Wind. Fire. Water. Sacrifice. In Animal Kingdom a ritual carves a dimension that melds character, object, landscape and the very tactile makeup of the film itself into one mutating, symphonic mass of spell casting, storytelling, living and dying. An explosive account of cinema as witchcraft.
Animal Kingdom
Phantom Islands
Rouzbeh Rashidi
Daniel Fawcett, Clara Pais
Phantom Islands is an experimental film that exists at the boundary of documentary and fiction. It follows a couple adrift and disoriented in the stunning landscape of Ireland’s islands. Yet this deliberately melodramatic romance is constantly questioned by a provocative cinematic approach that ultimately results in a hypnotic and visceral inquiry into the very possibility of documentary objectivity.
Phantom Islands
Closure of Catharsis
Rouzbeh Rashidi
James Devereaux
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.
Closure of Catharsis
TRAILERS
Rouzbeh Rashidi
Vicky Langan, Maximilian Le Cain
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.
TRAILERS
Light & Quiet
Rouzbeh Rashidi
Rouzbeh Rashidi
One is presented with a man. A man who has no news or mail. A man who lives alone. A man who resides only to himself and his hotel room. He is tortured by his mind, and in that sense he could be claustrophobic in even the largest of cityscapes, like the one that spreads out far beyond his hotel room. A city that will bring characters who will present him with small courier tasks. But in the end it is this human nature that will alienate him from all of those whom he knows (be they crooks, radicals or cultural gangsters).
Light & Quiet
Reminiscences of Yearning
Rouzbeh Rashidi
Toofan Nasehi, Pooria Nick Dell
Reminiscences of Yearning is so many ghosts, searching the landscape for traces. there’s no sense of the past- it’s in the present, searching the footage for what remains, a summoning of the disappeared. We’re invited to patiently wait and see if they appear or not. A ritual. At least …
Reminiscences of Yearning
HE
Rouzbeh Rashidi
James Devereaux, Cillian Roche
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.
HE
