North American Premiere
Total Refusal returns to MODES with new work following 2020’s dazzling live performance of Operation Jane Walk, and their anti-war masterpiece, How to Disappear. In the moments when the algorithm of their existence shows inconsistencies, the Non-Playable Characters (NPCs) of the popular action-adventure game, Red Dead Redemption, break out of their routines momentarily to display their faultiness and present something touchingly human.
Jacob Banigan
Austria
2022
English
Featured in:
MODES 3
Whimsical, questioning and utterly absorbing, a collection of animated work delving into worlds of wonder, subversion, and Marxist mystery. These works are fun and some re-construct ideas of animation, paying homage to experimentalists who came before.
Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre
All the Lovers in the Night
A lonely proofreader's isolated world begins to open through an unlikely friendship with a gentle physics teacher. Based on Mieko Kawakami's acclaimed novel, this luminous drama is a delicate meditation on loneliness, intimacy, and self-discovery.
Clarissa
Arie and Chuko Esiri’s Clarissa brings Mrs. Dalloway to present-day Lagos, with Sophie Okonedo playing the titular society hostess opposite David Oyelowo, Ayo Edebiri, and India Amarteifio in a Nigerian vision of class, privilege, and past lives.
Image: © Courtesy of Elevation Pictures
Opening Gala: The Debut
VIFF is honoured to open the festival with this special by-invitation screening of Jesse Eisenberg's The Debut. When meek Mona (Julianne Moore) lands a part in a musical, she fully inhabits her character, but grows increasingly untethered from reality.
Árru
Set against the mountains and fjords of northern Norway, Árru follows reindeer herder Maia as a proposed copper mine threatens her Sámi community, forcing her to fight to protect both her community and the land that sustains it.
The Beloved
When Esteban Martínez, an acclaimed director with violent tendences, invites his estranged daughter to star in his latest project, the stage is set for a familial reconnection. But as tensions flare, questions about his intentions rise to the surface.
MODES 1
Archive and the land reveal other ways of seeing, ensuring that what is meant to endure cannot be erased.
Credits
Screenwriter
Total Refusal
Cinematography
Total Refusal
Editor
Total Refusal
Original Music
Adrian Haim
Director
Total Refusal (Susanna Flock, Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner, Michael Stumpf)
The pseudo-marxist media guerilla collective Total Refusal explores and practices strategies for artistic intervention in contemporary computer games. They work with tools of appropriation and rededication of game resources. Their films and performances were presented among others at the Berlinale and at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. They received the award for Best Short Documentary Film at the 2020 Diagonale Festival of Austrian Film.