A golfer fails to strike, a soccer team plays against itself and a rally co-driver faces an identity crisis. They are surrounded by an audience unable to act. Shot inside of sports video games, A WORLD AT STAKE turns the ordering principles of victory and defeat upside down and negotiates social roles between individual sovereignty and collective passivity.
To play is to shape the world at hand inside a system, not to follow the rules. Twisting sports gameplay into dream-catastrophe scenarios, WORLD AT STAKE is a poem, a synthesis. A FIFA match runs bizarre since all the players look alike and are using a large earth shaped ball instead of a football. A car rally goes astray when the driver takes a wrong turn and the co-pilot confesses his resentments, while the car is bombarded by the pouring rain. An aqua show is half submerged under water. A game of golf takes place on the only speck of land above the sea line. Although this all takes place within a virtual engine, we cannot shake the feeling that there is no planet B. (Emil Vasilache)
The media guerilla Total Refusal is a collective of artists, researchers, and filmmakers who upcycle the resources of mainstream video games to create political narratives in the form of videos, interventions, performances, and lectures. Their work has been screened at over 250 film and art festivals and exhibited at various spaces. Since their foundation in 2018, Total Refusal have been awarded with more than 50 prizes and honorary mentions, amongst them Locarno’s Best Short Direction Award 2022 and Best Short Film at the European Film Awards 2023.
