Rouzbeh Rashidi: A Decade of Cinema

18180 min

Lighthouse Cinema presents a special three-hour masterclass with Rouzbeh Rashidi. This event offers unique insight into his creative process, as the session explores the first phase of his filmmaking, from 2009 to 2019. Structured as a chronological film essay, followed by an extended audience Q&A, the programme examines eleven feature-length works made during a formative decade, starting with Only Human and ending with Luminous Void: Docudrama.

Produced in Ireland between 2009 and 2019, these films form a unique body of work within experimental cinema. Working outside mainstream models, Rashidi developed a personal and philosophically driven practice. Narrative, memory, exile, desire, and perception are continually dismantled and reconfigured. This masterclass offers a rare opportunity to engage directly with Rashidi’s process, witness the evolution of his distinctive approach, and gain insights into the artistic choices and philosophies that shaped these films.

Using selected film excerpts, Rashidi will guide the audience through the evolution of this period in chronological order. The journey moves from the melancholic Only Human to the unstable, dreamlike, and metaphysical terrains of later works like Bipedality, Closure of Catharsis, Hades of Limbo, Indwell Extinction of Hawks in Remoteness, HE, Ten Years in the Sun, Phantom Islands, and Luminous Void: Docudrama. Common themes include fractured identity, spiritual dislocation, erotic despair, unstable memory, spectral places, and cinema's capacity to capture what resists language.

At the centre of the programme is cinema as an event of thought, sensation, and poetic intensity. Rashidi’s films do not explain experience in a conventional way. Instead, they immerse viewers in states of consciousness, emotional residues, and philosophical atmospheres. His cinema features formal risks, shifting textures, degraded images, ruptured continuity, and tension between the documentary and the hallucinatory. The result is a body of work that treats the moving image as an inquiry into existence.

This masterclass offers both a critical dissection and a philosophical autopsy of a completed artistic period. It is for those interested in experimental filmmaking, personal cinema, and the poetic possibilities of film. Rashidi will discuss the technical processes, aesthetic decisions, and philosophies behind these works. He will also place them within the context of exile, artistic independence, and a life committed to cinema.

The programme concludes with an extensive Q&A. The audience is invited to join a deeper conversation about the films, methods, and ongoing questions. This event offers a unique opportunity to engage with one of Ireland's most distinctive bodies of experimental feature filmmaking from the past two decades.