Adele Tulli speaks about her new filmReal, which explores the impact of digital technology on our understanding of reality, and how a guy dressed as Yoda inspired the film.
Real saw its world premiere at the 77th Locarno Film Festival in the Cineasti del Presente section, a selection of new directors’ first and second features. The film asks what “reality” really means in a world mired in digital technology. Its debut comes at an interesting time during this conversation of digital technology, as generative AI has exploded onto the scene with its fair share of controversy, with an Ai-generated film even being featured at Locarno. According to a description on Locarno’s website, “Real aims to delve into the ongoing metamorphoses triggered by our relationship with digital technologies.”
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Tulli spoke about these subjects in an email interview with The Hollywood Reporter. When asked what inspired the film, she responded, “I started thinking about some of the topics addressed in the film years ago when I was living in London […] One day I saw a man of South Asian origin in a narrow street behind Trafalgar Square hustling with a suitcase, extracting a mask from it. He was standing under a CCTV camera, and I just imagined how a surveilling gaze would process a scene like this, in times of terrorism suspicion and racial discrimination.”
She added, “He actually got dressed as the legendary Jedi master Yoda and walked fiercely towards the square filled with tourists, mounted on a pedestal and stayed there for hours, levitating on a stick as the hero of the Skywalker Saga, while passersby took smiling pictures with him. The Instagrammable, reassuring image captured by dozens of tourists’ smartphones conflicted with the one tracked by one of the largest urban surveillance schemes in the world. What do these contrasting images narrate?”
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The image of “this masked figure surrendering to the omnipresent, disembodied, mechanical gazes surrounding us, that can offer opposite interpretations of reality,” kick-started the writing process of the film just as COVID struck. “Since then,” Tulli said, “the digitization of our lives has taken on unimaginable proportions and our screens have become portals into digital landscapes where most of our interactions take place. I felt that whatever we used to call real was collapsing and I started looking for ways to represent this collapse.”
Real Seeks to Capture The Nuance of Digital Technology
The film captures both the joys and horrors of digital life. She said, “I began this project with an urge to delve into the ongoing emotional, social and cognitive metamorphoses triggered by our relationship with digital technologies, at a time when I felt that a number of fundamental qualities of the world as we knew it were no longer there, such as the boundaries between physical and meta experiences, between public and private spheres, between ideas of true and fake, as between a body and its simulation.”
She continued, “I did not intend to illustrate either a technophobic perspective or a simply positive, unquestioning one. Being the subject matter so multilayered, complex and constantly evolving, my intention is to offer the audience a kaleidoscopic, immersive, thought-provoking visual journey exploring how it feels to be human in the digital age, trying to raise critical questions on some of its disquieting aspects and crucial challenges.”
Real holds up a strange, fun-house mirror to ourselves in the bizarre fronter of digital life. “In trying to imagine and recreate the way machines look at us,” Tulli said, “the film eventually turns the familiar into something unfamiliar, uncanny, estranged, and through its distorted lenses, we may recognize our contemporary media-saturated existence.”
Source: The Hollywood Reporter