Iris of the Noon (2022)

Summertime. In a camping, three little girls listen to an old mysterious story about a missing kid. They start to investigate.

An odd traveler named Nice Eyes walks the streets and deserts of Utah as his mind, body and soul deteriorate into a far more primitive state.

TRAILERS unites the most personal and experimental aspects of underground filmmaking with a scope that is as cosmically vast as a science fiction epic. Rashidi’s ongoing exploration into the nature of cinema sees a group of characters adrift in space, each locked into their own sexual rituals while a cataclysm of universal proportions unfolds. Humanity has become a mysterious burlesque show for alien eyes: the gaze of the film camera. This visionary spectacle uses multiple formats and visual textures in weaving an erotic anti-narrative suspended in its own space and time.

A tale of people unfolds under the night sky. These doomed couples and lost individuals begin journeys and attempt to find resolution in their lives. Love is observed from a distance, sadness is in the air. With little sympathy for the loss and destruction caused to the characters, the stories progress and become neatly woven into a minimalistic portrayal of modern life.

An experimental short short featuring my wife Melissa. Shot in super 8 mm

A singular cinematic figure, San Francisco’s Mike Henderson became one of the first independent African-American artists to make inroads into experimental filmmaking in the 1960s. Henderson’s work throughout the 1970s and 1980s, from which this program of 16mm films is culled, thrums with a sociopolitical, humorous sensibility that lends his small-scale, often musically kissed portraits (which he later dubbed “blues cinema”) a personal, artisanal quality. - Film Society of Lincoln Center. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive.

The bodies of women lying on the ground weave relationships around them, they breastfeed, they connect with the ground ... Carla Simón's first short, shot on 16 mm in the Californian forests. An experimental exercise that connects with the cinematographic avant-gardes of the early twentieth century.

Preserved by the Academy Film Archive.

A small Youtuber occasionally makes half ironic videos for few to see. A half narrative, half experimental view of the numb feeling of consuming endless amounts of content online instead of doing anything else, forever.

During an imaginary actors exam, in order to choose the best, the jury utilizes immoral ways of selection – spying, making conflictd, humiliating the applicants – in short, taking advantage of its power.

Anger discusses his Aleister Crowley-inspired theories of art: How he views his camera like a wand and how he casts his films, preferring to consider his actors, not human beings but as elemental spirits. In fact, he reveals that he goes so far as to use astrology when making these choices. This is as direct an explanation of Anger’s cinemagical modus operandi as I have ever heard him articulate anywhere. It’s a must see for anyone interested in his work and showcases the Magus of cinema at the very height of his artistic powers. Fascinating. (Dangerous Minds)

Watch drug-addled friends through the eyes of a kaleidoscope. See coloured shapes dance and flail around. Witness people clubbing, getting beaten up, dancing and being used as human guinea pigs – all these in segments held together by two French teenagers finding themselves waiting for Godot. Experiment Three is another trip into the disturbing and bizarre world of public service announcements, contorted into something confronting and colourful.

Andrew, a teacher, is attacked while leaving work in a failed mugging which results in him becoming critically injured. While he is bleeding out a Deity appears healing Andrew but this is at a cost.

Fragments of interesting people and things amongst a handful of D train stops in Queens, New York. Filmed on Super 8 mm.

Composed of original footage and re-filmed found footage, Oneirologue is a remembrance of a dream that occured in June 2020. It is an experimental short that presents the impression of a mind plagued by cinematic images and subconscious impulses.

"Normal Porn for Normal People" is an appropriated media piece that explores our societal need to consume violence for entertainment. The film offers a satirical commentary on the romanticizing and normalization of violent imagery, while observing the link to commercial consumerism that exploits human sexuality, while simultaneously demonizing it. Interview segments echo our endless need to devour salacious content by venerating both real and fictional violence. Sexuality and sexual images remain a convenient scapegoat that facilitate a continued avoidance regarding the impact that the glorification of violence has within American culture.

A man (James Devereaux) sits on a park bench talking to the camera, trying to weave together a thought that won’t cohere while commenting on passers-by, his ‘guests’… Mysterious images intervene, overturning the serenity of the park-bench monologue. Rouzbeh Rashidi’s feature proves as engaging as it is elusive.

An assortment of obscure private obsessions, conspiracies and perversions flicker on the verge of incoherence against the context of vast cosmic disaster in Rouzbeh Rashidi’s boldest film to date. This sensory onslaught combines a homage to the subversive humour of Luis Buñuel and Joao Cesar Monteiro with the visionary scope of a demented science fiction epic.

A relationship between a man and a woman discloses during the course of the film.

HE, the third work in the ongoing collaboration between Rouzbeh Rashidi and actor James Devereaux, is a troubling and mysterious portrait of a suicidal man. Rashidi juxtaposes the lead character’s apparently revealing monologues with scenes and images that layer the film with ambiguity. Its deliberate, hypnotic pace and boldly experimental structure result in an unusual and challenging view of its unsettling subject.