Phantom Islands is an experimental film that exists at the boundary of documentary and fiction. It follows a couple adrift and disoriented in the stunning landscape of Ireland’s islands. Yet 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.
"Phantom Islands was always conceived as a creative documentary, a documentary on the moment at which 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 the documentary reality of the moment in which it is filmed? These questions have always haunted me and played a crucial role in my filmmaking. I make films with an almost documentary approach, using places and people that I encounter and responding to them with an uncommon degree of freedom and spontaneity. My films are constructed from the footage I accumulate rather than from a predetermined script, which is also a documentary method. Yet the result is always the creation of a fictional universe. Phantom Islandsconsciously examines the tension between these two apparently opposing categories of filmmaking that seem less and less distinguishable the closer you look at them. Confronted with a landscape or a human being, does filming them or choreographing them in a specific way make them more ‘documentary’? Or is ‘documentary’ simply a category of fiction, a term used to give audiences an indication of the type of film they will be watching?"
Rouzbeh Rashidi, Director
Phantom Islands plays at the Audi Dublin International Film Festival next month,
70 CinÉireann / January 2018
DIR: ROUZBEH RASHIDI
PRO: EXPERIMENTAL FILM SOCIETY
PHANTOM ISLANDS
TBC