Kurzfilm-Programm und Artist Talk: Serious Games

In the organizer's words:

Image: Valeria Hoffmann, AliEN0089, 2023, video still

As part of the Next Level Festival 2024 and the exhibition Silke Schönfeld: You cann't make this up , the HMKV presents two short films followed by an artist talk.

Valeria Hoffmann - AliEN0089 (2023)

During the protests in Chile, a stranger sneaks into a mysterious spiral house on the outskirts of the city. What looks like an entomologist's studio is also the home of SABINA, 32, a gamer who has just recorded a video about the harassment she is subjected to in a war video game. She publicly states that the aggression goes beyond the screen and she knows she is being persecuted in her real life. As if it were a first-person video game, the stranger manages to avoid Sabina's gaze and hack into her computer, blurring the boundaries between the real and virtual worlds with chaotic consequences.

Valeria Hofmann (1988) is a Chilean director who lives between Santiago and Valparaíso and works with media and technology. Her work mainly revolves around documentaries and innovative narrative forms, with a particular interest in the horror and science fiction genres. Hofmann was a member of the artist collective MAFI - Filmic Map of a Country - whose projects have been shown at various venues including IDFA DocLab, Centre Pompidou, MAC Santiago and public television, and with whom she made two documentaries: 'Propaganda' (2014), which premiered at the Visions Du Reel festival and was awarded the jury prize for the most innovative documentary, and 'God' (2019), which also premiered at Visions Du Reel. In 2019, Hofmann studied experimental cinema at the Lav School in Madrid and directed various short films such as 'The Ram's Nap' (2020), a documentary reflecting on the intersection of food, magic and technology. In 2023, she released the short film "AliEN0089", which blends animation and live-action techniques to tell the story of a gamer who is harassed in a virtual game world. "AliEN0089" premiered at Sundance in 2023 and won the award for Best Director for an International Short Film. Hofmann is currently developing "LUV", a website dedicated to media archaeology, funded by the National Production Fund for New Media in Chile.

Stefan Panhans - Freeroam À Rebours, Mod#I.1 (2016)

The starting point of Freeroam À Rebours, Mod#I.1 are various shortcomings in the behavior of video game avatars controlled by human players. These "error scenarios" are transferred to the bodies of real performers and re-enacted in the medium of film. Those "failed behaviors" of game avatars - including skipping actions, idling, repeatedly failing to perform an action or imperfectly approximating human movements and gestures - are generally seen as the result of inadequacies and inability. This is especially true in a society characterized by the pressure of functionality, economic imperatives and self-optimization. At the interface between experimental film, video clip and contemporary dance performance, Stefan Panhans' film takes a precise, subtly humorous look at these "mistakes".

With his cinematic, performative, photographic and installation works, Stefan Panhans (*1967 in Hattingen) explores the effects of increasing hypermediatization and digitalization on the body and psyche of our society. Stefan Panhans lives and works primarily in Berlin and Hamburg.