Solas Nua's CIFF@Home with NYU DC Dialogues presents Phantom Islands.
2018 | Experimental Drama | Runtime: 86 minutes | English (No dialogue)
Phantom Islands is an experimental film directed by Rouzbeh Rashidi that exists at the boundary of documentary and fiction. It follows a couple adrift and disoriented in the stunning landscape of Ireland’s islands. This deliberately melodramatic romance is constantly questioned by a provocative cinematic approach that ultimately results in a hypnotic and visceral inquiry into the very possibility of documentary objectivity.
This event took place on
Wednesday, November 10 • 6 PM ET
Q&A was streamed live, registration gave you access to an on-demand film link to view ahead of the live discussion.
This is a free screening series - donate what you can to help Solas Nua bring you quality Irish film programming and provocative discussion.
Live Q&A with director Rouzbeh Rashidi, in conversation with visual artist, Jackie Hoysted.
Introduction by Solas Nua board member Kate Meenan-Waugh.
Rewatch the full discussion below | Runtime: 39 minutes
Phantom Islands was conceived as a creative documentary, a place where documentary and fiction become indistinguishable. At what point does a person or landscape that is filmed become fiction? At what point does a fictional construct collapse back into documentary reality? These questions have always haunted Rouzbeh Rashidi and played a crucial role in his filmmaking. He makes films with an almost documentary approach, using places and people that he encounters and responds to them with an uncommon degree of freedom and spontaneity. Rouzbeh’s films are constructed from accumulated footage rather than from a predetermined script, which is a documentary method. Phantom Islands consciously examines the tension between these two apparently opposing categories of filmmaking that seem less and less distinguishable the closer you look at them.
Hand-picked by Solas Nua's Capital Irish Film Festival, CIFF@Home with NYU DC Dialogues is a bi-monthly, curated series of Irish film.
Selected for you to watch from the comfort of your own home, registration will give you access to an on-demand film link to view any time between now and Nov 10., as well as a live interactive Q&A that will be streamed via Zoom Webinar after you have watched the film on your own schedule.
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. Rashidi has worked entirely away from mainstream conceptions of filmmaking, striving to escape conventional storytelling stereotypes. Instead, he roots his cinematic style in a poetic interaction of image and sound. His work is deeply engaged with film history, and primarily concerned with mysticism, philosophy, esotericism, cosmology, phenomenology, and hauntology.
Jackie Hoysted, (b. Dublin, Ireland) is based in Montgomery County, Maryland and is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist, curator and activist. She has had solo exhibitions across the US and her work has been featured in the: Washington Post, Washington City Paper, HuffPost, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and Reno Gazette-Journal. She is the recipient of grants from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Maryland State Arts Council and the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County.
She is co-founder of ArtWatch, a DC artist collective focused on positive political activism that realized the One House project (2017 & 2018) – a collaboration of 300 DMV artists standing up for equality and inclusion.
Jackie has a degree in computer science from Trinity College Dublin and a fine arts degree from the George Washington Corcoran School of the Arts and Design.
Registration is required in order to receive access to the on-demand film link, as well as the log-in details for the Zoom webinar. Please note that this program may be recorded.
Live auto-transcript captioning will be available on this Zoom webinar.
• CIFF@Home takes place on the last Wednesday of every second month •
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