The Films That Only You Can Make

The Films That Only You Can Make is a self-paced course in personal experimental filmmaking, derived from the live six-week course Theories of Personal Experimental Filmmaking and conducted by Rouzbeh Rashidi for the Experimental Film Society. It opens from a renunciation — of cinema-as-industry, with its competences, its careers, and its consoling certainties — and from the recognition of the moving image as a spectral, oneiric, hauntological event: a phenomenology of light through which memory, mysticism, esotericism, and cosmology pass into one another without resolution.

It is not a course in technique. It will not teach you to operate a camera or an edit; it has no concern with production, with content, or with career. It attends instead to the older and more dangerous questions — why one summons images at all, what cinema is beneath the industry that has colonised it, and how a maker descends into the dreaming interior of their own perception and returns bearing films that could have issued from no one else.

Its method is transmission rather than instruction. Across a sequence of performative lectures, curated viewings, and readings — drawn from two decades inside Rashidi’s own filmmaking laboratory and from the work of the artists of the Experimental Film Society — cinema is approached as séance and laboratory at once: a discipline of summoning, of attending to the spectral and the surreal, of trusting intuition at the precise point where method fails. At its centre stands the Homo Sapiens Project — the film-diary Rashidi has kept since 2000, offered not as a finished work to be admired but as an open laboratory: evidence of what a life given wholly to the image can become.

The wager of the course is singular and it does not compromise: that the only films worth making are the ones that already haunt you, and that they are not learned but exhumed — recovered from memory, solitude, and the oneiric, against every industrial and conventional method that would foreclose the poetic, the ethereal, and the transcendental. To make such films is less a profession than an existential necessity — a way of moving through isolation and identity, of reconfiguring one’s sense of space, time, and self, of insisting upon a cinema that is personal before it is anything else.

Adapted for solitary study, this self-paced course delivers the full philosophical substance of the live course in a form you may enter at any hour, follow in your own order, and return to without end. It is intended less as a course to be completed than as a body of thought to be lived beside — a companion to the descent, and the place where your own laboratory begins.

Begin making the films that only you can make. Enrol now for immediate, lifelong access to the complete self-paced course.

The Companion Films

Three films accompany every course at EFS Film School — Phantom Islands, Trailers, and Homo Sapiens Project (200). They are given to each student on enrolment: personal download links, yours to keep, watched in your own time. They are not illustrations of the teaching; they are its evidence. The ideas met in this course were first worked out inside these films, and lead back to them.

The Foundations of This Teaching

The course does not arrive from theory alone. Its evidence is drawn from three foundations: