EFS
“... the most active, prolific and intrepid group of experimental filmmakers working in Ireland today.” AEMI
Experimental Film Society (EFS) is an Irish company dedicated to the production and screening of experimental cinema. It grew out of the former Experimental Film Society collective which was formed and managed by the company’s founder and director, Rouzbeh Rashidi. EFS concentrates on nurturing film projects which reflect the distinctive cinematic vision that it developed over its eighteen-year existence as a not-for-profit collective. EFS produces films that are distinguished by an uncompromising devotion to personal, experimental cinema. These films adopt an exploratory, often lyrical approach to filmmaking and foreground mood, atmosphere, visual rhythms, and the sensory interplay of sound and image. EFS is at the centre of a new wave of Irish experimental filmmaking. EFS also curates screenings of experimental film, mainly by filmmakers and artists associated with it, both nationally and internationally. EFS was founded in 2000 in Tehran, Iran by Rouzbeh Rashidi and has been based in Dublin, Ireland since 2004. As a film collective, it produced, co-produced, or otherwise assisted in the production of over fifty no-budget or very low-budget feature-length films and 500 short films. In 2011, EFS began to organise screenings, performances, and talks, an initiative that has since resulted in over one hundred events all around the globe. In mid-2017, EFS became a company limited by guarantee to facilitate the increasingly ambitious and professionally funded projects it now focuses on.
The Programme for Sound Collector Nov 30th at the Project Arts Centre:
Ghoul (2018) by Michael Higgins / 8mins / Ireland
The ghosts of a man and his dog haunt a rural Irish field in this claustrophobically atmospheric plunge into unsettling nocturnal textures.
Play Ground (2017) By Vicky Langan / Maximilian Le Cain / 17mins / Ireland
Play Ground is a tribute to the great Dutch filmmaker Frans Zwartjes. Langan & Le Cain play characters locked into patterns of desire who seem unable to connect in this playful but ultimately melancholy film. It formed the basis of the first Langan / Le Cain live performance.
The Underworld (2019) By Jann Clavadetscher / 17mins / Ireland
This hallucinatory trip through the psychedelic recesses of science fiction begins in the flickering bowels of the earth. An explorer played by Cillian Roche undergoes a bizarre mutation in which cinema itself might possibly play a part. Clavadetcsher’s gorgeous 16mm colours and dazzlingly intense editing are underscored by a characteristic lightness of touch.
Antler (2018) By Atoosa Pour Hosseini / 15mins / Ireland
Pour Hosseini’s work with Super-8 conjures a mysterious territory that exists between memory, subjective perception and the objective materiality of the filmed image. Antler pushes deeper into this realm, seamlessly combining archival footage of animals and reptiles in their habitats with newly filmed material of the artist and an assistant at work in a botanical garden.