ARTE France – Les Films Invisibles
An absurd documentary journey through a bewildering parallel world
Filmmakers Ekiem Barbier and Guilhem Causse (Knit’s Island) take actor Victor Assié on a disorientating journey: the making of a documentary series filmed entirely within an online video game, with the aim of exploring this virtual world through the guise of an avatar and finding a place amongst its inhabitants. Victor soon discovers a simulation of everyday life, where players willingly assume the roles of civil servants or administrative officers in a small rural town of their own creation.
For several years, we have been drawn to online video games and connected spaces as fertile ground for documentary-making. Over time, our gaze has turned particularly to so-called sandbox games: open, connected worlds without a predetermined narrative, where players are free to invent their own stories, codes, or nascent societies.
With In real life, we once again set out to question this digital double that increasingly pervades our lives, shaping our habits and our way of being in the world. As the calls for dematerialisation grow louder in our society, and as we are each day offered new shared, localised and monetised virtual experiences, the boundary between the virtual and the real has perhaps never been so porous.
Through our exploration of these worlds, we seek to understand the irresistible urge to find online an outlet for our imaginations, passions, desires and follies, whether through social networks or video games, behind anonymity and masks. Online video games offer distinctive spaces, with their own rules and peculiarities: worlds in which one can either lose oneself entirely or, conversely, reinvent oneself: where it is possible to construct a bespoke space and project what one cannot bring about in real life.
