Mentoring
EFS Film School · Study · Mentoring
A one-to-one accompaniment, offered by arrangement and in limited number: a sustained, bespoke encounter with an artist’s work — its method, its difficulties, its instincts, and its unresolved questions.
I.A Practice Built Around the Artist
Over many years, Rouzbeh Rashidi has mentored artists, filmmakers, moving-image practitioners, writers, and interdisciplinary creators. The relationship has taken many forms and arrived by many pathways, but it is never a fixed or generic service. It is, each time, a bespoke encounter with a particular practice — shaped around its project, its questions, its limitations, and its artistic ambitions.
II.How Mentoring Begins
Mentoring usually begins in one of two ways.
Through a funded application
Often an artist makes contact while preparing a grant application, a bursary proposal, a project award, a residency application, an exhibition proposal, or a film development plan, and is seeking an experienced mentor to guide them through the process. Where appropriate, Rouzbeh provides a letter of support for the application. Should the funding be awarded, he then designs a tailored mentoring programme built around the specific nature of the artist’s practice — their project, their questions, their limitations, and their ambitions.
Through private arrangement
In other cases, artists approach independently, using their own resources, because they are developing a film, an installation, an exhibition, a gallery or museum presentation, a moving-image work, an essay film, or an experimental cinematic project, and they require sustained intellectual, artistic, and philosophical guidance. Whatever the route, the mentoring is shaped to the artist before it — to their work, their method, their instincts, and the questions they have not yet resolved.
III.Not Technique, but Vision
This is not mentoring in technique. It offers no training in camera operation, editing software, production management, equipment, lighting, or sound recording, and no instruction in post-production workflow or the practical mechanics of filmmaking as a craft. Its work takes place elsewhere — in the deeper territory of cinema as an art of perception, thought, rhythm, duration, intuition, poetic structure, philosophical inquiry, and personal vision.
For the true techniques of cinema are not, finally, technical procedures. They are ways of seeing, hearing, thinking, sensing, assembling, waiting, failing, returning, and discovering form.
The mentoring concentrates, then, on the philosophical, poetic, lyrical, theoretical, historical, and cinephilic dimensions of the work. It helps an artist clarify the inner necessity of a project, understand the deeper logic of their images, strengthen their relationship to cinematic form, and uncover the aesthetic, conceptual, and emotional architecture already latent within the work.
IV.Cinephilia as a Living Companion
A great part of this process is cinephilia. Rouzbeh brings a lifelong and extensive knowledge of cinema into the relationship, offering carefully chosen films, filmmakers, and movements, alongside books, essays, theoretical texts, visual references, and historical contexts that can open new pathways for the artist.
These are never decorative recommendations. They are living companions to the work — films and texts that can help an artist understand their own project more profoundly, finish a difficult film, reimagine an exhibition, resolve a structural problem, or recognise the hidden lineage to which their practice belongs.
V.The Questions That Guide the Work
The task is not to train an artist toward a template, nor to fit a work to a model that already exists. It is to accompany them through the more difficult, and more essential, questions:
What is this work trying to become? What kind of cinema is already speaking through it? Which images are necessary, and which are merely functional? What is the rhythm of the project? What does the work know before the artist knows it? How can a film, an installation, or a moving-image work find its own form, rather than imitate one that already exists?
Mentoring is offered in limited number, when capacity allows. Each programme is designed for the single artist, and the single project, before it.
All teaching at EFS Film School stands on three foundations:
A body of feature films, 2009 onwards — cinema conceived as a way of life, made in complete creative freedom. The feature films →
The film-diary kept since 2000 — offered within the teaching not as finished work to be admired, but as an open laboratory, entire. The project →
Founded, directed, and curated by Rashidi since 2000 — over two decades of making, curating, publishing, and sustaining a collective practice, from which both the filmmaking and the teaching descend. That history is documented in the Society’s publications, including Luminous Void: Twenty Years of Experimental Film Society. The Society → · The books →