Atoosa Pour Hosseini
Directing
Biography
Atoosa Pour Hosseini (b. Tehran, Iran 1981) is an artist-filmmaker based in Dublin, Ireland. Her work, which is influenced by historical avant-garde cinema, explores questions about illusion, reality, and perception through the media of film, video, installation and performance art. She works with the material textures of 8mm film as well as digital processes to explore layers of space and time, superimposing imagery and creating entrancing patterns of repetition with startling interruptions. She holds a MA in Fine Art Media from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, and a BA in Fine Art Painting from the Azad University of Art and Architecture, Tehran. She has received awards from the Arts Council of Ireland, Dublin City Council, Culture Ireland, and Temple Bar Gallery and Studios. She is a member of Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, and a Co-Director of the Experimental Film Society (EFS) which is an Irish company dedicated to the production and screening of experimental cinema, and frequently participates in discussion forums and exchanges, such as the LUX Critical Forum in Dublin. Her works have been shown in many galleries, museums, festivals, and showcases throughout the world, in countries such as Iran, Ireland, Northern Ireland, England, USA, The Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Greece, Croatia, Brazil, Colombia, Portugal and Estonia. Her work forms part of the Irish and International Institutes collection as well as private collections. Pour Hosseini moved to Ireland in 2006 and currently lives and works in Dublin.
Known For
A documentary like no other. Starting with the bizarre practices and fantasies of a group of filmmakers working under the label Experimental Film Society, it spins off into a manifesto of light and sound. This dazzling journey through a view of cinema as cosmic ritual and erotic delirium is also an idiosyncratic celebration of the medium itself. Rouzbeh Rashidi’s ornate visual style unleashes a parade of visionary scenes that redefine movie magic as a fevered hallucination.
Luminous Void: Docudrama
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Luminosity (2)
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Nightfall
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
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
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Another Time
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 (201) (2002-2021)
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Dimensions
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
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.
Homo Sapiens Project (200) (2000-2020)
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Incubus
A film of subtle poetics and expressive aesthetics achieved through the hypnotizing intertwining of archive and authorial footage, "Antler" erases the boundaries between fiction and documentary, introducing the viewer to a mysterious and, to a certain degree, fairy-tale-ish world of oneiric atmosphere. Formally seductive, and challenging to decipher, this "ecological fantasy" (for the lack of a more precise definition) transforms a botanical garden into a laboratory of evocative images and sounds, in a process that could be identified as alchemy.
Antler
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.
Ten Years In The Sun
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
Figures emerge from and retreat back into the waters of the oasis, coming forward to greet the eye of the Super-8 camera. The scene initially appears idyllic. But the alien scrutiny of the artificial eye is sinister, at cold cross-purposes to the human warmth it brushes against.
Oasis
The masked female figures that wander adrift through Pour Hosseini’s intensely lyrical explorations of displacement find their most energetic form in the bird-woman at the centre of Kinetics. Shot in saturated 16mm colour, this dreamlike film follows a primeval female figure exploring an ancient landscape poised over an endlessly blue sea. She is at once alienated from and engaged by her surroundings, which suggest a site of self-discovery as much as one of profound disorientation.
Kinetics
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Reflected
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Luminosity (1)
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Silences
"Then" examines the mysterious world that has been embedded in memory of time and space, a virtual universe which exits somewhere between reality and dream. Images in "Then" progresses and dissolves into another and creates a haunting audio / visual experience.