THE “WORLD’S” OPINION – MUST SEE
Entirely designed from image captures, Knit’s Island. The endless island never raise your head DayZ, an online simulation game in which each player attempts to survive in a postapocalyptic universe. A box states: “In this space of 250 square kilometers, everyone is free to imagine their own story, their own character. Some play thousands of hours. » Former students of the Beaux-Arts de Montpellier, Ekiem Barbier, Guilhem Causse and Quentin L’helgoualc’h are passionate about virtual worlds: they had already signed Marlowe Driveimmersion in the heart of GTA V. They played DayZ for four years, or 963 hours, of which 170 were devoted to “shooting” their film.
There will be little action or missions to complete in Knit’s Island. The endless island : the small team wanders in the middle of a wilderness, explores disused buildings and interviews players – everyone, in DayZ, seems to know that a film crew is lurking nearby. The directors’ feat lies in their way of managing to organize, we don’t know how, the staging within a virtual territory. We surprise ourselves by being struck by the beauty of a camera movement, of a shot.
From these hundreds of rushes the film draws contemplative material, a world where “playing” is synonymous with wandering, wandering and exploration. The uninitiated will experience the disturbance of admiring a hyperrealistic nature which has the thickness of a dusting of pixels. We are then overcome by a strange feeling of melancholy, as if this postapocalyptic world was in fact the mirror of ours, if not its tomb.
Philosophical questions
Each player interviewed seems to be there to experience what, in real life, they miss: adventure, camaraderie, partying, danger. Impossible to establish the typical portrait of the practitioner of DayZ : we come across an over-armed and cannibalistic militia who uses video games as a release, or a couple who like nothing more than to walk and chat around a fire.
So many practices that raise a whole bunch of philosophical questions: can we judge a virtual act of violence morally? What does it mean to die or take drugs in DayZ ?
Little by little, the exploration of the game lets itself be haunted by what is happening outside the field: the reality of these men and women scattered across the globe, but all in front of their computers. One is confined, the other has to leave the game to pick up his son from school. Reality is then reduced to being nothing more than that: everything that moves around the edges of our screens.
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