Experimental and Personal Filmmaking
Experimental and Personal Filmmaking
Course Title: Experimental and Personal Filmmaking
Full Information, Logistics and Rules
Organiser: EFS Film School
Tutor: Rouzbeh Rashidi
Duration: Five days
Dates: Monday 17 August to Friday 21 August 2026
Location: Unit 4, 32 Brunswick Street North, Dublin 7, D07 TWX3
City: Dublin, Ireland
Age requirement: You must be at least 18 years old to enrol in this course.
Language: This course is conducted in English.
Language code: EN-GB
Tuition fee: €650
One-time payment only. Accommodation is not included.
Early Bird Discount: Register by Monday 6 July 2026 to receive a 10% early-bird discount.
Hours: 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. daily, including several breaks and a lunch period.
Availability: Minimum of 6 participants; maximum of 20
Course Introduction
Experimental and Personal Filmmaking is an intensive five-day on-site programme devoted to the study and practice of alternative cinema, artists’ moving-image work, and experimental film. Conceived as both an immersion and an invitation, the course offers participants a sustained encounter with the history, philosophy, poetics, and creative methodologies of experimental moving-image practice.
Through screenings, lectures, discussions, and readings, participants will engage with the ways in which filmmakers and artists have used film, video, and digital media to challenge inherited forms, expand the expressive possibilities of the medium, and transform their perception of the world. The course will consider how major works of experimental cinema investigate the material and conceptual capacities of moving images, and how such works continue to reshape our understanding of what cinema may be.
Alongside close attention to image, form, and context, particular emphasis will also be placed on the role of sound in deepening the affective and sensory force of these works. By studying the structure, texture, and intention of diverse experimental practices, participants will gain a richer understanding of the lyrical, idiosyncratic, and aesthetically radical possibilities of filmmaking.
This inquiry will serve not only as a critical and philosophical foundation, but also as a practical point of departure for the creation of new work.
The course is especially concerned with the growing importance of personal and lyrical forms of moving-image practice in contemporary life. It addresses the paradoxical condition of the moving image today: omnipresent and yet often insufficiently seen, deeply familiar and yet profoundly estranged. In response to the unsettling sociopolitical audiovisual landscape of the 21st century, the course approaches the moving image as a site of memory, perception, reordering, and renewal.
Learning Outcomes
The course draws its inspiration from Rouzbeh Rashidi’s Homo Sapiens Project, an ongoing venture in cinematic experimentation that has been evolving since 2000. Over the course of many years, this body of work has undergone repeated reinvention, shaped by processes of both radical transformation and deliberate reduction.
What began as a singular and highly personal laboratory of experimentation has come to resonate more broadly through its sustained engagement with existential experience, inner life, and the pressures exerted by wider social realities. From this foundation, the course offers both practical and theoretical outcomes.
Participants will undertake research into specific filmmaking approaches, methods, and techniques, and this process will culminate in the creation of both individual and collective moving-image works under expert guidance. In this way, the course seeks not only to deepen understanding but also to provide direct experience in the making of experimental cinema.
Artist’s Choice
Since 2000, Rouzbeh Rashidi has developed a distinctive and radical practice in experimental moving-image work. His cinema is grounded in a deeply personal vision, transforming the ordinary people, spaces, and encounters of everyday life into a phantasmagoric journey that tests the limits of the medium’s expressive and transformative power. In this process, images become forms of memory, and memory becomes inseparable from the shaping of selfhood and reality.
The Homo Sapiens Project (HSP), an ever-evolving undertaking, stands as the most sustained expression of this artistic process. Emerging initially as a film diary and a laboratory of cinematic forms, it has come to reveal an uncanny relation to the conditions of contemporary image culture and the escalating production of moving images in the present era.
The project foregrounds the existential force of personally generated moving images, their capacity to navigate isolation, alienation, and crises of identity, and their power to reimagine space, memory, and time.
It also gives rise to a vital question: how can one sustain a meaningful filmmaking practice when conventional and industrial modes of production no longer yield poetic or transcendent sensory experience? This course responds to that question by seeking out, amplifying, and cultivating the lyrical, ethereal, and sensory dimensions of experimental filmmaking.
For Rashidi and for HSP, filmmaking has always been understood in these terms: as a crucial instrument of personal inquiry and poetic becoming. That ethos forms the foundation of this course.
General Guidelines
This course is open to a wide range of participants, including filmmakers, artists from other disciplines, creative practitioners, and anyone wishing either to develop a new understanding of experimental cinema or to deepen an existing practice. Participants of all levels of experience are warmly welcomed.
It is important to note that this course differs fundamentally from a conventional filmmaking course. Traditional courses often concentrate on technical instruction, scriptwriting, storytelling, and industrially recognisable forms of production. This course deliberately moves elsewhere. Its emphasis falls instead on poetics, philosophy, intuition, and the development of a personal creative method capable of sustaining a lifelong engagement with experimental film.
Its ultimate aim is to create an intensely personal environment in which poetic cinema may emerge.
Please note that the sessions will not include instruction in camera operation or editing technique. Rather, the course places its trust in the intuition, inventiveness, and resourcefulness of each participant in working with the means available to them.
Participants should have access to:
a device capable of recording video, such as a smartphone or similar device
basic video-editing software, whether on a phone, a Mac, or a PC
Those who wish to work with more advanced cameras, software, or equipment are equally welcome to do so.
Teaching Methods, Topics and Benefits
Participants will develop the methodological, lyrical, and intuitive capacities required to express themselves through sensory and audiovisual artistic forms.
The tutor will work closely with students in a highly personal and unconventional manner, offering guidance in shooting, sound recording, editing, and the development of raw material into finished film work. The course welcomes participants from many different backgrounds and with many different levels of experience. Some may already be established filmmakers; others may be encountering filmmaking as a serious practice for the first time.
Whatever their starting point, participants will be encouraged to reinvent and reimagine both themselves and their working methods, setting out towards a more deeply poetic vision of cinema.
Reference materials, including films, essays, books, and selected web-based resources, will serve as important points of orientation throughout the course. Participants will also have the opportunity to share their thoughts, concerns, ideas, and projects within a collective environment, fostering discussion and reflection in a spirit of openness and mutual engagement.
The course will introduce participants to a wide range of critical conversations surrounding the creation and circulation of contemporary experimental cinema. These ideas will be explored not only in theory but also through practical exercises, allowing participants to absorb them into their own developing practice. In addition, the course offers access to materials by internationally acclaimed artists associated with the Experimental Film Society.
Perhaps most importantly, each participant will leave the course having contributed to a collaborative film and to a carefully shaped collective cinematic project. These works will remain as artistic traces of the experience and as living points of reference within future audiovisual practice.
Programme
Over many years, Rouzbeh Rashidi has developed and refined a unique approach to performative lectures, screenings, and discussions. These events have evolved continuously, reflecting an ongoing search for forms of teaching adequate to a cinema of inquiry, instability, and discovery. In encountering this work, one comes to understand that exploration itself lies at the centre of Rashidi’s approach to filmmaking.
His work proceeds as an ongoing movement of thought and creation in which the fundamental questions of cinema emerge organically through practice. These performative lectures, then, should not be understood as fixed declarations. Rather, they are glimpses into a body of work still in motion, still gathering force, and still opening onto new possibilities.
As Rashidi writes:
“I embarked on my filmmaking journey in the year 2000. From day one, I was consumed by a singular concept: exploring what cinema could represent in the new millennium. This question has been a driving force, propelling me to experiment and scrutinise consistently within my filmmaking laboratory. While I may not fit the traditional definition of a teacher, at my core, I am a filmmaker and nothing more.
Nonetheless, I impart my ideas and filmmaking techniques to provide context and support for both my work and the work of others. Moreover, I find immense value in developing literature and teaching methods that provide insight into my craft.”
Schedule
Day 1: Welcome reception and “Concepts of Cinema and Cinema Thoughts” — an immersive performative lecture
Day 2: Unfolding the “Experimental Film Society Statement” — a comprehensive performative lecture
Day 3: Detailed screening, insightful discussion, and engaging talk centred on the films of Rouzbeh Rashidi
Day 4: Hands-on experience in shooting, sound recording, and editing an Exquisite Corpse collaborative film
This collaborative work is inspired by a poetic game with deep roots in Surrealist and Dadaist practice. Since 2020, Rouzbeh Rashidi and his students have created one such collaborative film during each of his workshops and courses, allowing the process to become a culminating gesture of the class. Over time, Rashidi has established a distinctive set of rules, methods, and stylistic principles to guide the making of these works.
Each participant will contribute a segment to the final film, which will be screened and discussed critically at the close of the course.
Day 5: Finalising the edit and premiere screening of the Exquisite Corpse collaborative film
Registration
EFS Film School
