In a medieval village where K-pop dances are organized every evening after dark, a Jedi knight betrayed by his best friend sees his destiny turned upside down by the surprise arrival of Donald Trump in the middle of the fields. The plot that you have just read makes no sense a priori, and yet: it more or less sums up the short story that we witness with our eyes wide open, on a Sunday morning in November, surrounded by a trio of screens giants in a large dark room at the Pitoëff Theater in Geneva.
Alongside us, half a dozen spectators, the most daring of whom have just typed the words and sentences that cross their minds, on the keyboards of tablets arranged for the occasion behind the seats. After a few seconds, these elements end up appearing in voice-over and in the form of slightly animated tables, often surreal, in a style typical of the famous “hallucinations” of image generators (who else could have imagined this bear -Superman or that bull on his back filled with slices of sandwich bread?). And the stories follow one another without ever stopping, nourished and reinforced by each new prompt…
Rewarded at the last South by Southwest (SXSW) festival with the Best Immersive Experience Award, the work The Golden Key is currently visible at the PHI Center in Montreal, Canada, until January 12, 2025. For our part, it is at the Geneva International Film Festival (GIFF), as part of its always very rich immersive selection, that we were able to experience it last weekend of November 9. And along the way ask a few questions to his two co-directors, Matthew Niederhauser and Marc Da Costa.
