Dublin-based experimental filmmaker Rouzbeh Rashidi is one of the most radical and independent talents in contemporary underground cinema. Here Rouzbeh tells Film Ireland about his latest film, Ten Years in the Sun, which screens at this year’s Jameson Dublin International Film Festival. Plus filmmaker and critic Maximilian Le Cain gives his reflections on the film.
My new experimental feature Ten Years in the Sun will receive its premiere at this year’s Jameson Dublin International Film Festival. It was one year in production and throughout the course of shooting and editing it drastically mutated and deviated in various ways from its initial idea. In this film, I have taken elements from such genres as science fiction, horror and erotic drama and given them a radically minimalist treatment. My aim was to attain what could be described as a ‘ground zero of drama’ through the systematic removal and breaking down of any narrative structures.
On this project I have intentionally worked with a wide range of collaborators and actors, and without their tremendous support this film would have been impossible to make. One of them was filmmaker and critic Maximilian Le Cain. These highlights from his personal reflections on the film might offer some insight into it:
“It has been building up through a number of his recent films – Terrors Of The Mind, Forbidden Symmetries, Investigating The Murder Case Of Ms. XY – and now it has erupted with full force: a sense of vast cosmic chaos, randomness and terror. The result is a sensory onslaught that destroys any sense of narrative development, that allows for a dizzyingly reckless catalogue of dead ends and invasions by footage and techniques that can seem utterly alien to one another… And yet a very human sense of wistfulness also emerges that prevents this experience from becoming cold or detached…
“A two-and-a-half hour running time, spectacle galore, numerous sinister characters and plots portentously introduced but left unresolved… …the incoherence and oddness of this sense of non-completion is not plastered over but cranked up to the highest degree of fragmentation…
“The crust of an external objective reality is no more. There is only tormented interiority and distant annihilating vastness. And the carriers of these symptoms are precisely presented modes of (mainly moving) imagery and its attendant technology. A very 21st century hell…”
Ten Years in the Sun screens at the Light House Cinema on Friday, 27th March 2015 at 8PM as part of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival.
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