Acting
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.
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.
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.
A man living on a remote rocky island where only stone and ocean surrounds him, seems to do some meaningful task. He is carrying stones, sometimes burying them and sleeping on them. He continues doing the same tasks, never revealing to the viewer the reason of his work. “Sisyphus Condition” refers to Ancient Greek mythological hero Sisyphus who was punished for his self-aggrandizing craftiness and deceitfulness by being forced to roll an immense boulder up a hill, only to watch it come back to hit him, repeating this action for eternity.
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.
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.
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.
Featuring Brandon Hill, County Kilkenny, Ireland. Elevation: 515 meters, the highest point in Co. Kilkenny, situated near the River Barrow and the town of Graiguenamanagh. Composed of granite from the Leinster Granite Batholith, formed during the late Carboniferous period, approximately 300 million years ago. A personal multi-layered essay film that positions Kilkenny's highest peak, Brandon Hill, as the main protagonist. Through various alternative documentary methods, home movies and re-enactments the film explores the past and present mutual effects between a geographical location and its people.
A mourning filmmaker from the US and her Irish assistant tour the West of Ireland to research for a film about a legendary pirate queen from the 16th century.
At One Fell Swoop deals with a stone carver and his metamorphic wander through rural Ireland. In passing he slips through the film’s frames into a re-imagining of his surroundings in which he finds himself trapped in a flickering, shifting world of shadows on an intense cataclastic path towards a dead end. Photographed anamorphically on expired 16mm black and white film with a 50year old hand-cranked camera and entirely hand-processed At One Fell Swoop resembles a phantom-like film lodged amid multiple stratums of time and space.
When Anton O'Neill returns home after five years at sea, he finds that 1970's Ireland is a radically different place to the one he left behind. Northern Ireland is in flames, and civil unrest has spilled south of the border to his beloved home in County Cavan. Blinded by hatred and misguided patriotism 'Anton' is led into an illicit world of violence and is forced to choose between his family and his country. Hunted and on the run, Anton is drawn into a battle of wills with the law and his former accomplices, ending in a showdown in which he must risk everything to protect the woman he loves.
To the outside world, Yvonne is a strong, happy and successful woman. But when she returns home to be with her sick mother, she is forced to make life-changing decisions and the facade that she has carefully constructed begins to collapse.
