In between Identities

2015

experimental film // 8:50

Jury statement, Open Frame Award 2017:
Just a moment ago, we are still floating above the city, yet in the next instant we find ourselves at the edge of a flat roof, plunging between concrete walls. A free fall — yet the impact never comes. We glide through urban landscapes, crossing the boundaries between public and private with ease, encountering bodies that seem as optimized as the fully commercialized environments through which we follow them. Characters connected only by their desire to be seen. Their gaze seems always directed at themselves. They belong to the surface of a computer game, which here serves not only as found footage but becomes the film set itself. Within this set, the filmmaker subjects his characters to exhausting choreographies of bored gestures and everyday actions — actions whose longing for visibility remains without consequence, running into emptiness again and again.

One hand on the joystick, the other holding a video camera, the filmmaker attempts to reach his digital actors, to get close to their desensitized surfaces, and thus to transcend the boundaries of the game. He provokes them into abnormal behaviours, drives them to perform impulsive acts, and, together with them, submits himself to failure. In these conflicting moments of control and loss of control, the digital figures grow complex and reveal something human. A driving, refreshingly amoral commentary on the self-discovery performances — not only of our seemingly perfect digital mirror images.

Text by Alex Gerbaulet