The production of Rouzbeh Rashidi’s latest feature film TRAILERS has begun, it will be a project that explores the relationship between digital & celluloid images. Seventy per cent of Trailers will be comprised of 35mm film (unearthed archival material & prints of old trailers from a wide range of movies). The remaining thirty percent be various reconstructions of images or moments inspired by the celluloid trailers. This phase of production will be undertaken in a dark studio space where he will deploy stylized and highly artificial effects (using back-projection and chroma key) in a rigorous fashion. The film deals with concepts such as voyeurism and ritualistic perversion in cinema with formalistic austerity favouring science fiction and horror moods of presentation. Rashidi plans to recapture & re-create scenes from this 35mm material and investigate the history of Cinema; drawing narrative suggestions, composing & decomposing genre elements and creating a poetical interaction between sounds & images. This re-animated body of sound and image lived a full and rich life in its original form, so now by resurrecting the fragments in an experimental aesthetic, he intends to exhaust the cinematic potential of the footage by exploring & representing this material as a mental site of extreme formalism and sensory experience.
TRAILERS was kindly funded by Arts Council of Ireland as part of the Film Project Award 2015. The film will be produced by Experimental Film Society and will be completed in 2016.