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.
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Two Prosecutors
In the midst of Stalin’s purges, a naïve prosecutor sets out to investigate a prisoner’s innocence, unaware of the labyrinthine bureaucracy awaiting him. A Kafkaesque procedural thriller about the pursuit of justice in the face of corruption.
Image: © SBS Productions
Crepúsculo
A brain surgeon (Arturo de Córdova) begins to doubt his own sanity when the woman he's in love with (Gloria Marin) marries his brother — and he starts fantasizing about murder.
Victims of Sin
This movie is a hot scramble of piety and passion, sentimentality and sleaze. Ninón Sevilla plays Violeta, a rumba sensation who oversteps when she rescues a newborn from the trash. This gets her fired and wins the enmity of the pimp who fathered the kid.
Calle Málaga
Seventy-nine-year-old María Ángeles lives independently in Tangier's Spanish quarter. When her daughter pressures her into selling her apartment, she refuses to give in, finding in her old age a new resilience and an unexpected romantic connection.
In the Palm of Your Hand
Charming, (over-)confident clairvoyant Professor Karin hits the jackpot when he hears about a beautiful widow whose millionaire husband has just died. But you don't need to be psychic to see that blackmailing a killer may not be his best idea...
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.