Highlights
Best Secret Place (Caroline Poggi, Jonathan Vinel): Video games are not interactive movies. Video games are lucid dreams. Poggi & Vinel explore gaming culture's fascination with death and violence, guns and destruction with irony, gore, and gusto. Fallout 4 references, Easter eggs, power ups, and glitches. There's also full machinima, around 30 minutes in, as well as shorter gameplay sequences here and there. There's even a huge crate, straight out of an Aram Bartholl's installation. This is about (r)eXistenZ. It's all there, in these juicy, deranged sixty minutes, until the end of the (virtual) world.
The Masterpiece (Alex Lora): Class warfare. Lora makes it very clear that only entitled PMC morons drive Teslas. If you think about it, pseudo liberals embracing a libertarian techno-fascist edgelord to show off status behind the pretense of ecological concern makes perfect sense. As Zizek would say, they are both worse. There's hope, however: in the ongoing struggle between the haves and the haves-not, the latter may have the edge, if nothing else, because of their sheer number. The tension is rising, Lora says. You just wait.
The Exploding Girl (Caroline Poggi, Jonathan Vinel): Neo-cinema fueled by game engines. Synthetic gore, post-internet memes, smartbomb kills all. Inner rage and teenage angst of the patchwork girl become a literal explosion. The dynamite vest is another example of Poggi and Vinel's morbid sense of humor.
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