Rouzbeh Rashidi's TRAILERS

The production of Rouzbeh Rashidis 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.

Wild-screen, Connemara

Max Le Cain and I are showing work as part of Wild-screen this March 7th-8th in the beautiful Inagh Valley in Connemara, Co. Galway. I'll also be playing records at Joyces pub in Recess on Saturday 7th March  to mark the launch of the Wild-screen publication All mountains begin on the ground.

The full programme is published online here: http://www.wildscreenireland.com/programme.html

Wild-screen/Scáil-fhiáin (Irish translation) is a site-specific contemporary art screening featuring a range of international artists working in film as an art medium. Wild-screen is created by artists Louise Manifold and Úna Quigley.  

Through presenting the works in an unusual installation context outside the more expected urban venues and using such sites to platform a critical engagement, the event aims to explore and challenge ideas around wilderness, wildness and the cinematic sublime.  

On the 7th and 8th March 2015 audiences will be invited to take a pilgrimage into the epic landscape of  Connemara for a weekend event. The event will centre on the screening of the artists films over two days. The audience will experience exciting experimental film works from Irish and international artists in an industrial space, the Inagh Hatchery designed by Irish modernist architects Scott Tallon and Walker.  

Situated in a secluded location in the epic Inagh Valley, the artists Quigley and Manifold have responded to the site of Connemara, one of last wildernesses left in Ireland, in terms of the artists they have invited to screen their films, alongside their own new works that they filmed in Connemara as part of the project.  

Wild-screen is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland, Galway County Council, Údarás na Gaeltachta, and The Galway Arts Centre.