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.
Homo Sapiens Project (200) was completed in 2020 as part of the 20th anniversary of Experimental Film Society. This eight-hour experimental feature is constituted from short film experiments made between 2000 to 2010. These films have already undergone many metamorphoses over the years. They were always restless wandering spirits seeking a permanent place of rest but so far without success. Each section of Homo Sapiens Project (200) was made under the unique condition of living out a form of subtle therapeutic practice. Collectively they reflect major life-changing events, formalistic mutations and thematic shifts within Rouzbeh Rashidi’s filmography. In spite of this, they could not find the peace of a satisfactory final shape. Indeed, they are about peace, something that rarely (if ever) exists within Rashidi’s work. But now, after twenty years of roaming the subconscious, they have come to rest in a permanent retirement in one world, one very personal floating planet.
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.
The Kingdom Of Shadows is a mystical cinematic experience which stirs from the darkness the spirits of our ancestors and reawakens the horror of unresolved crimes and denied desires.
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.
Rouzbeh Rashidi (Persian: روزبه رشیدی; born 23 December 1980, Tehran, Iran) is an Iranian-Irish avant-garde filmmaker and founder of Experimental Film Society. Since 2000, Rashidi produced experimental feature films and numerous volumes of instalments for the Homo Sapiens Project. His work is deeply engaged with film history and primarily concerned with mysticism, philosophy, esotericism, cosmology, phenomenology, and hauntology. The films are wildly experimental and often surrealist, magical realist, and mysterious, and have been associated with the Remodernist movement. Rashidi also generally designs the soundscapes that accompany his films. His decision to avoid dialogue in most films is a conscious link to early cinema, which is a frequent point of reference in his work and a reminder of his belief that cinema is always in the process of being invented and reinvented.
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