The project, a posteriori, is obvious: to show the reality of a virtual world, there is nothing like going to film a documentary there. Ekiem Barbier, Guilhem Causse et Quentin L’helgoualc’h had already attempted an immersion in GTAby interviewing players encountered by chance. The strength of the meeting pushed them to develop the device, which, for rights reasons, was directed towards a more confidential survivalist game, DayZset on a post-apocalyptic island.
The device consists of nothing more and nothing less than entering the matrix: the documentarians play, encounter and capture what they see, recording the voices of their interlocutors after having explained their project to them. Their gaming session is therefore a filming, and the subjective camera a shooting. Exciting challenge in which a player takes on the role of a contemplator, who will have to find the right distance with others, move through the landscapes in such a way as to show them to others than him, outside the game, and in an overhanging position that has little to do with playability.
The first approach comes from sociology: questioning the players means getting to know the quest they have created in this open world where everything is doable. And to see to what extent, in a genesis offered to human beings, the founding elements regain their rights. Some, drunk with anarchy, kill for pleasure and make chaos the only lasting value. Others invent new religions, while their neighbors simply try to cultivate the land or appropriate the areas in which they are entrenched. Violence, faith, community, solitude: in this world where we spend and waste our free time, destinies are written and new accomplishments are outlined.
The crucial question of the relationship between the real and the virtual fades quite quickly in favor of another: what reality is written when one is entirely in control of one’s destiny, even if it is in fiction. And this is where the documentary manages to open up unsuspected horizons. Because the terror of certain sequences (the cold opening on this pack led by a woman whose definition of “fun” leaves you wondering) is followed by a gallery of touching portraits, of voices scattered across the planet, and united within a environment where something else could happen. Encounters, beliefs, a quest, a goal to achieve, or the simple contemplation of pixels capable of curing the thirst for beauty, like that which would delight the hiker in the real world, or the surveyor of a museum facing chefs -work of art history. The film has little interest in combat, survivalist techniques or player strategies: what matters is what is at stake in the long term, and the way in which certain players, explorers of a world that is familiar to them, in which they now have a history and memories. A new relationship with the virtual is then invented, contemplative and poetic: a couple recounts their relationship with nature, and a solitary walker becomes a true philosopher in an incredible sequence within a cave.
By following these avatars, and leaving the exhibition of the documentary device upstream, the directors manage to familiarize us with this environment. We no longer witness a sociological experiment, we become part of a community, listen to others, and watch, ultimately, as humanity grapples with the most fundamental questions. Because the immense success of the film lies precisely in erasing all the marks of facticity (of the documentary, therefore, but also of the filming and the virtual world itself) to come into contact with being authentic. If a few sequences tear the veil a little (sound clues about the existence of children, some evoking their country, the pandemic, even their profession), the interest is not to show reality, but to allow the truth of beings to flourish within this fabricated universe. And to do this, we must film this world as reality: with admiration and wonder, to reveal its continuing beauty. The result is a singular poetry, a fantastic work on the lights (night sequences lit by the players’ torches, starry nights, against days), the composition of the shots (pictoriality of a landscape in the foreground of which the carcass of a rusting car), the movement of the “cameras” (running away from the group to show the community on the move)… The training in Fine Arts of the documentarians is revealed in each shot, to the point of exploiting the limits of the representation (the strange dance taken with a subjective camera) or the bugs of the matrix (a swim in the sky, a walk on water) to bring out a striking poetry, endowed with a metaphorical force as powerful as random.
In this universe where a group of players undertakes a long walk to reach the limits of the known world, hybridization gives the work an unexpected aesthetic force. A video game lover’s praise; a cinema film within a documentary; a philosophical quest within a virtual world; a confessional for avatars; a moving encounter with the fragility of beings who will have revealed it through the masks they wear. Or the very definition of art.
