EFS Film School

🎬 Two Separate Events in Dublin This August

This August, Rouzbeh Rashidi comes to Dublin with two entirely independent events — a five-day intensive masterclass with EFS Film School, and a three-hour film essay and Q&A at Light House Cinema.

These are separate events with separate ticketing. You are warmly invited to attend either one, or both — entirely on your own terms.

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Experimental and Personal Filmmaking
Five-Day Intensive Masterclass

📍 Dublin
📅 17–21 August 2026
🕙 10:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. daily

Organised by EFS Film School, this five-day intensive masterclass offers an immersive exploration of experimental cinema as a personal, poetic, and philosophically grounded practice.

Through lectures, screenings, discussions, readings, and collaborative work, participants will engage with form, sound, image, and radical audiovisual expression.

This is not a conventional filmmaking course, but a space for filmmakers, artists, and moving-image practitioners seeking a more personal, exploratory, and uncompromising approach to cinema.

⚠️ Places are limited — early registration is strongly encouraged.
🔗 efsfilmschool.com/experimental-and-personal-filmmaking
📧 [email protected]

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Rouzbeh Rashidi: A Decade of Cinema
Three-Hour Film Essay + Q&A at Light House Cinema

📍 Light House Cinema, Dublin
📅 22 August 2026
🕑 14:00

A standalone public screening — no prior attendance or knowledge required.

Light House Cinema hosts Rouzbeh Rashidi: A Decade of Cinema, a three-hour event tracing the first major phase of Rashidi’s filmmaking through a chronological film essay.

Featuring selected excerpts from eleven feature-length works made between 2009 and 2019, the programme offers a rare insight into the artistic, philosophical, and methodological foundations of his practice, followed by an extended audience Q&A.

🎟️ Early booking is highly recommended.
🔗 lighthousecinema.ie/film/rouzbeh-rashidi-a-decade-of-cinema

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🎬 Two August Events in Dublin

This August, two consecutive events offer two distinct ways into Rouzbeh Rashidi’s cinema: a five-day intensive masterclass with EFS Film School, followed by a three-hour chronological film essay and Q&A at Light House Cinema.

⸻

1. Experimental and Personal Filmmaking
Five-Day Intensive Masterclass

📍 Dublin
📅 17–21 August 2026
🕙 10:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. daily

Organised by EFS Film School, this five-day intensive masterclass offers an immersive exploration of experimental cinema as a personal, poetic, and philosophically grounded practice.

Through lectures, screenings, discussions, readings, and collaborative work, participants will engage with form, sound, image, and radical audiovisual expression.

This is not a conventional filmmaking course, but a space for filmmakers, artists, and moving-image practitioners seeking a more personal, exploratory, and uncompromising approach to cinema.

⚠️ Places are limited — early registration is strongly encouraged.
🔗 efsfilmschool.com/experimental-and-personal-filmmaking
📧 [email protected]

⸻

2. Rouzbeh Rashidi: A Decade of Cinema
Three-Hour Film Essay + Q&A at Light House Cinema

📍 Light House Cinema, Dublin
📅 22 August 2026
🕑 14:00

The following day, Light House Cinema will host Rouzbeh Rashidi: A Decade of Cinema. This three-hour event traces the first major phase of Rashidi’s filmmaking through a chronological film essay.

Featuring selected excerpts from eleven feature-length works made between 2009 and 2019, the programme offers a rare insight into the artistic, philosophical, and methodological foundations of his practice, followed by an extended audience Q&A.

🎟️ Early booking is highly recommended.
🔗 lighthousecinema.ie/film/rouzbeh-rashidi-a-decade-of-cinema

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For me, one of the urgent questions in cinema is not what an image means, but how long we can remain with it before we explain it away. The moment we speak too quickly about an image, especially one of suffering, violence, death, or catastrophe, we risk neutralising it. We turn it into information, evidence, or a concept to be consumed and forgotten. But the image, if it is an image, is not a container of meaning. It is a wound in time.

Hence, silence matters. Silence is not the absence of thought. On the contrary, silence is the condition through which thought becomes possible. When an image is left silent, it is not emptied; it is intensified. It begins to look back at us. It refuses our desire to classify it, master it, or place it inside language. It asks us to endure its presence before we turn it into an argument.

Duration is essential. A brief image can be consumed; a prolonged image must be confronted. When cinema holds an image, the spectator is no longer protected by speed. The image becomes an encounter. We begin to feel our act of looking, our impatience, discomfort, and hunger for explanation. The image exposes what it shows and the spectator who looks.

This is important with atrocity. To aestheticise suffering too easily is obscene; to explain it too quickly is another form of violence. The filmmaker must resist the temptation to dominate the image through commentary, music, rhetoric, or sentimentality. Sometimes the most ethical gesture is to withdraw, to let the image breathe, to remain unresolved and unbearable.

Cinema, does not simply communicate ideas. It creates a space in which thinking can occur before language conquers experience. The image must not become the servant of explanation. It must retain its darkness, autonomy, mystery, and accusation.

Filmmaking is not only the art of showing. It is also the discipline of not interfering too soon. Sometimes the most radical gesture is to look, to wait, and to let the image remain alive.