Adele Turi talks about her new film, “Real,” which explores the impact of digital technology on our understanding of reality and how the man dressed as Yoda inspired the film.
“Real” had its world premiere at the 77th Locarno Film Festival in the Cineasti del Presente section (a section that selects first and second features by new directors). The film questions what “real” really means in a world immersed in digital technology. Its debut comes at an interesting time, as AI generation has exploded into the discussion of digital technology, with considerable controversy, and an AI-generated film being screened at Locarno. As explained on the Locarno website, “Real aims to delve into the ongoing transformations caused by our relationship with digital technologies.”
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Tali spoke about these themes in an email interview with The Hollywood Reporter. When asked what her inspiration for the film was, she replied, “I began thinking about some of the themes explored in this film many years ago, when I was living in London. One day, in a narrow street behind Trafalgar Square, I saw a South Asian man walking quickly with a suitcase, trying to reach for a mask. He was standing under CCTV. I imagined how a scene like this might be perceived by surveillance eyes in an era of suspected terrorism and rampant racism.”
She added: “He actually dressed up as the legendary Jedi Master Yoda, strode bravely into a square packed with tourists, climbed onto a pedestal and remained there for hours, suspended in the air on a pole as the hero of the Skywalker Saga, while passersby took smiling photos with him. The reassuring, Instagram-worthy images captured on dozens of tourists' smartphones were contradicted by images tracked by one of the world's largest urban surveillance systems. What do these contrasting images tell us?”
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The image of “these masked figures succumbing to an omnipresent, disembodied, mechanical gaze that offers us a polar opposite interpretation of the reality that surrounds us” prompted Tuli to begin writing the film as the coronavirus pandemic hit. “Since then, the digitization of our lives has reached an unimaginable scale, our screens becoming portals into the digital world where most of our interactions take place. I felt that what we once called reality was collapsing, and I began looking for a way to represent this collapse,” Tuli said.
The real world is trying to capture the nuances of digital technology
The film captures both the joys and horrors of digital life. She said: “I began this project out of an urge to explore the ongoing emotional, social and cognitive transformations caused by our relationship with digital technologies. At the time, it felt like many fundamental qualities of the world as we knew it no longer existed: the boundaries between physical experience and meta-experience, the public and private spheres, concepts of truth and falsehood, the body and its simulation.”
She continues, “I have not set out to portray a technophobic perspective, or merely a positive and unquestioning one. As the subject matter is so multi-layered, complex and constantly evolving, my intention is to offer the audience a kaleidoscopic, immersive and thought-provoking visual journey that explores what it feels like to be human in the digital age, and raise important questions about some of its unsettling aspects and critical challenges.”
“Real” holds up a strange and amusing mirror to us at the bizarre frontier of our digital lives. “In attempting to imagine and recreate how machines might see us, the film ultimately transforms the familiar into the unfamiliar, the uncanny, the alienating, and through whose distorting lens we might perceive our contemporary, media-soaked existence,” Tali said.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
