Book Launch – Luminous Void: Twenty Years of Experimental Film Society edited by Rouzbeh Rashidi, Maximilian Le Cain & Atoosa Pour Hosseini

Rouzbeh Rashidi (born in Tehran, 1980) is an Iranian-Irish filmmaker. He has been making films since 2000, at which time he founded the Experimental Film Society in Tehran. He has always worked completely away from mainstream conceptions of filmmaking, striving to escape the stereotypes of conventional storytelling. Instead, he roots his cinematic style in a poetic interaction of image and sound. He generally eschews scriptwriting, seeing the process of making moving images as exploration rather than illustration. His work is deeply engaged with film history.rouzbehrashidi.com

Atoosa Pour Hosseini is a Dublin-based visual artist, filmmaker, member of Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, and co-director of Experimental Film Society. Her work is influenced by historical avant-garde cinema, and explores questions about illusion, reality, and perception through the media of film, performance, and installation. She works with the material textures of 8mm and 16mm film as well as digital processes to explore layers of space and time, superimposing imagery and creating entrancing patterns of repetition with startling interruptions, set adrift on an ineffable current of memory. atoosapourhosseini.com

Maximilian Le Cain is a Cork-based experimental filmmaker affiliated with Experimental Film Society, a Dublin-based company dedicated to the production and distribution of experimental cinema. He frequently works in collaboration with Vicky Langan. Their feature film Inside (2017) was recently acquired for the Arts Council Collection. His work explores a personal relationship with cinema as a site of haunting. It is rooted in the spectral nature of the moving image and concerns establishing a personal dialogue with the history of ʻcinemaʼ in the broadest sense of the word. He is also a film writer and programmer. maximilianlecain.com

Adrian Martin is a world-renowned film critic and theorist who has been hailed as “one of the most imaginative and creative of film writers. He has been in love with the cinema for going on 50 years, and his texts often challenge boundaries between criticism, theory and creative writing” (Moving Poems). He is Adjunct Associate Professor in Film Culture and Theory at Monash University. His work has appeared in many magazines, journals and newspapers around the world. He creates audiovisual essays in collaboration with Cristina Álvarez López. His most recent book is Mysteries of Cinema (Amsterdam University Press, 2018). He has contributed audio commentaries to over sixty DVD/Blu-ray releases including for the BFI, Arrow and Masters of Cinema labels. filmcritic.com.au