About
EFS Film School · About
EFS Film School is an independent, artist-led environment for the study and practice of personal, poetic, and experimental cinema.
It emerged from the long artistic trajectory of Rouzbeh Rashidi and the wider constellation of the Experimental Film Society, founded in 2000. The school carries forward a form of cinema that is intuitive, rigorous, mysterious, handmade, philosophical, and resistant to simplification.
EFS Film School does not teach cinema as a fixed grammar. It does not treat filmmaking as the execution of a predetermined model. Instead, it asks what cinema can become when it is returned to perception, solitude, memory, sound, image, duration, atmosphere, and the unknown forces that move through an artist’s life.
The school is built around a simple but demanding belief: every serious filmmaker must eventually discover a personal method — not a style borrowed from others, not a vocabulary inherited without examination, but a living method capable of sustaining a lifetime of work.
At EFS Film School, cinema is approached as a parallel life: a way of thinking through images, sensing through sound, and transforming private experience into audiovisual form.
I.Philosophy
The philosophy of EFS Film School begins with the conviction that cinema is not merely a medium of representation. Cinema is a mode of being — a field in which the visible and the invisible, the real and the spectral, the personal and the impersonal, the remembered and the imagined, begin to contaminate one another.
The school is concerned with cinema as memory, perception, ritual, diary, essay, dream, laboratory, and encounter. Its teaching moves through film history, personal practice, experimental form, poetic thought, sound, silence, duration, landscape, montage, hauntology, mysticism, phenomenology, and the strange intelligence of images.
The purpose is not to explain cinema until it becomes harmless. The purpose is to sharpen one’s attention until cinema becomes dangerous again: alive, unstable, intimate, and necessary.
EFS Film School exists for those who understand that filmmaking is not only the making of films. It is the cultivation of a relation to the world.
II.Who EFS Film School Is For
EFS Film School is for those who feel that cinema must become more personal, more mysterious, more exacting, and more alive.
- For filmmakers who wish to move beyond habit.
- For artists from other disciplines who are drawn to the moving image.
- For writers, photographers, performers, musicians, and thinkers who sense that cinema may become another form of thought.
- For beginners who possess seriousness and curiosity.
- For experienced practitioners who wish to undo their own certainties.
- For those who are not looking for shortcuts, but for a deeper artistic path.
III.What Makes EFS Film School Different
EFS Film School is not built around standardised instruction. It is built around an artistic practice.
Its teaching comes directly from Rouzbeh Rashidi’s long engagement with cinema — as filmmaker, writer, curator, tutor, and founder of the Experimental Film Society. The school’s courses are not detached from this practice; they are extensions of it.
Students encounter cinema through lectures, screenings, readings, discussions, exercises, fragments, provocations, and practical tasks. They are invited to think with films, not only about them — and they are encouraged to treat their own images not as illustrations, but as living substances.
The emphasis falls on perception, intuition, form, atmosphere, sound, rhythm, duration, and the emergence of a personal method. Technique is not dismissed, but it is never allowed to replace vision. Equipment is not fetishised.
The essential question remains: what can be made from the materials, limitations, wounds, memories, and energies already available to you?