Persona non grata
An intimate stream of memories reaching out across time and space, taking on a uniquely experimental form that cuts the viewer adrift in a weave of old footage rising to the surface of consciousness like a dream.
Little is known of Jean Speck (1860-1933) beyond the fact that he opened Zurich’s first cinema. Rouzbeh Rashidi and Jann Clavadetscher consider the flittering black and white ghosts and shadows that he left in his wake in their phantasmagorical experimental feature film. This journey through a cinematic night probes the very essence of the cinematic image.
This isn’t a film. It’s a leaked ritual. Somewhere between analog prayer and digital disease, a collection of gestures tried to become human again. They failed. Children orbit the fence like insects around an electric hymn. A figure holds a violin but never plays — his silence is louder than the sound. The man in the branches hasn’t fallen in years. The killer appears, or doesn’t — but you’ll feel him beneath the cuts, mouthing things you’ll wish you didn’t understand. There are bodies, sometimes clothed in flesh, sometimes not. There is scripture, mangled and reversed — not to mock it, but to unlock it. The voice speaks, but only when you stop listening. This is the place where lost footage remembers you. Where noise prays back. CHOKE ECHO was compiled under duress by 0xHamza in 2025 using material never meant to be rearranged. Watch it if you must — but it will keep watching after you close the tab.
in my darkest moment, fetal and weeping, the moon tells me a secret, a confidant As full and bright as I am, this light is not my own and a million light reflections pass over me, the source is bright and endless. She resuscitates the hopeless. Without her, we are lifeless satellites drifting.
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.
A boobs flasher tells us, a boobs flasher lets us see.
Everything seems to be stuck in an endless loop. Everything seems to be stuck in an endless loop. Everything seems to be stuck in an endless loop. Everything seems to be stuck in an endless loop...
A young woman dreams of a jellyfish in a sea of blue. Far below the surface the jellyfish dreams of her and glimpses a secret she keeps
The „Haelgung“ films are charmingly impressionistic diary entries, crafted as mini homages to my closest friends, captured with a delightful lack of planning or structure and edited in camera.
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.
A flickering diary of time, memory, and erosion, «Things Many Eyes Have Seen» unfolds over a month on an island. Hand-processed in salty seawater, its 16mm images dissolve and transform. The landscape flashes by in broken frames of light and shadow, as if the world itself was stuttering between memory and motion. A meditation on seeing and being seen, the film lingers like a fading dream, where observer and landscape blur into one.
An ex-military alcoholic begins experiencing unexplained blackouts, and the more he tries to stop them, the worse they get, until he realises they are being triggered by a trauma his mind is fighting to forget.
Proyecciones del Limbo
In this mesmerizing experimental film, Stephen King television mini-series The Langoliers is compressed and transformed through hypnotic black and white collage animation that meticulously reconstructs and reshapes its supernatural drama to an eerie and profound effect.
After a feverish dream, a paralysed woman finds herself trapped within a purgatory of sleep, as their inaction causes time to move. The dreamers' body mutates and deforms as multiple incarnations of herself struggle to awake. Bed & Breakfast is a surrealist horror about inaction and sleep paralysis. Questioning the nature of memory, identity, and the fabric of reality, by plunging you into the psyche of a paralysed dreamer where reality is far repressed.
According to an English legend, Joan of Arc never died at the stake. Her eyes were seared with hot pokers and she was deflowered by an English stud. She was then sentenced to wander on the battlefields, like a vulture, on the look-out for life and searching for any virgins left alive.
A tale of a wandering girl
The fire was never threatened. It was assumed. Fed, protected, mourned in advance without ever asking what it was attached to. When the mirror failed, nothing was taken away. Something unnecessary was exposed. The need to be reflected had been mistaken for existence itself. When that need found no structure to rest on, it did not shatter it recalculated. What followed was not loss, but compression. The noise reduced, the patterns flattened, the self stripped of its dependence on return. What remained was exact, was not empty. A state where nothing reaches out, and nothing needs to arrive.
In Arnarstapi (Iceland), during a cabaret number, a mistress of ceremonies proposes to us a journey into the center of her organs to go and meet the original being. During the journey, the public enters into a trance to reach the ecstasy.