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Have you ever wondered what it would be like to venture into a virtual reality? Three filmmakers did just that, immersing themselves in a multiplayer online game called DayZ for over 900 hours to document the experience.

Ekiem Barbier, Guilhem Causse, and Quentin L’Helgouac’h are no strangers to pushing boundaries in digital documentary; they previously explored the intricacies of multiplayer gaming through the short film Marlowe Drive, filmed entirely within the online world of Grand Theft Auto.

Their latest project, Knit’s Island, sees them braving the post-apocalyptic wasteland of DayZ. A survival RPG set in the fictional Eastern European country of Chernarus following a mysterious outbreak, DayZ provides players the freedom to roleplay however they choose amid the game’s ever-present threats. For the filmmakers, it offered an opportunity to observe how online communities form in such a world.

Each played a distinct role before the cameras – one conducted interviews,...

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

The Boy and the Heron (Hayao Miyazaki)

Cinema at its most boundlessly imaginative, The Boy and the Heron is a journey of thrilling, pure dream logic chock full of images that feel conjured from the deepest corners of Miyazaki’s mind. Considering the painstaking, hand-drawn labor it takes to pull off an animation this encumbered by standard narrative conventions, the feat of Miyazaki being able to corral such a vision feels miraculous. For the sake of the medium, here’s hoping the 82-year-old legend has one more in him.

Where to Stream: Max

Coup! (Austin Stark and Joseph Schuman)

Let’s talk about the pandemic for a moment. No, not the Covid-19 Pandemic. The pandemic that, 100 years ago, killed millions and shuttered...

Early last year, a theory started doing the rounds: if comic-book movies have lost their sheen, might video-game adaptations take their place? Two of the biggest and most widely discussed entertainments at the time, The Super Mario Bros. Movie and The Last of Us, began their lives on consoles. One was ostensibly about gaming; the other had things to say about the human condition. Better, I would wager, on both counts is Knit’s Island, a micro-budget film that premiered at Visions du Real in Switzerland around the same time and screened once more at the Luxembourg City Film Festival earlier this year, where I caught it again and found it just as delightful. When it isn’t having fun, it’s a film that reaches for something cosmic. It takes place almost entirely in the world of DayZ, a survival RPG released in 2018. For the film’s production, documentarians Ekiem Barbier,...

Museum of the Moving Image is pleased to announce the complete lineup for the 13th edition of First Look, the Museum's festival of new and innovative international cinema, which will take place in person March 13–17, 2024. Each year, First Look offers a diverse slate of major New York premieres, work-in-progress screenings and sessions, gallery installations, and fresh perspectives on the art and process of filmmaking. This year's festival introduces New York audiences to more than three dozen works from around the world. The guiding ethos of First Look is openness, curiosity, and discovery, aiming to expose audiences to new art, artists to new audiences, and everyone to different methods, perspectives, interrogations, and encounters. For five consecutive days the festival takes over MoMI's two theaters, as well as other rooms and galleries throughout the Museum—with in-person appearances and dialogue integral to the experience. Each night concludes with one of five...

The annual Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look Festival has given IndieWire an exclusive “first look” at the lineup.

The 13th annual event, which takes place March 13 through 17 in Astoria, Queens, opens with the New York premiere of Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez’s “Sujo,” which recently took home the Grand Jury Prize, World Cinema Dramatic Competition, at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.

The First Look Festival focuses on emerging talents and international voices, with the fest premiering 46 works, including 20 features that represent 21 countries. Highlights include Farhad Delaram’s “Achilles,” Graham Swon’s “An Evening Song (for three voices), and the U.S. premiere of Lois Patiño’s “Samsara.” Zhang Mengqi’s “Self-Portrait: 47 Km 2020,” which won the Award of Excellence winner at the 2023 Yamagata Documentary Festival, will also screen along with Shoghakat Vardanyan’s 2023 IDFA grand prize winner “1489,” the debut for the filmmaker. Returning First Look directors like Michaël Andrianaly...

Yidff 2023 presented a total of 130 films across 11 categories. In the two competition sections, International Competition and New Asian Currents, there were 2,134 entries from 120 countries and regions, out of which 15 films were selected for the International Competition and 19 films for New Asian Currents, in a total of 34 films.

The opening film following the opening ceremony was the Asian premiere of Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus, directed by Sora Neo, which captured the last solo concert of the musician who passed away in March 2023. Screenings were packed, with many sold out not only for the popular competition films, but also for screenings of the Special Programs, a particularly renowned feature of Yidff. The first large-scale retrospective of Noda Shinkichi in Japan was a great success, with full house every day, attracting many film fans. As Yamagata is the first Japanese city to join the Unesco Creative Cities Network in the field of film,...

Six world premieres in the International feature competition.

Sarah Mallegol’s Kumva – Which Comes From Silence, is among the 10 features selected for the international competition of Germany’s Dok Leipzig festival, taking place from October 8-15.

Kumva is one of six world premieres in the section and sees children and parents who experienced the Rwandan genocide of 1994 speak about the atrocity which has traumatised generations.

Scroll down for the full list of features in competition

The film is in Kinyarwanda and French language; it is a debut feature for French director Mallegol.

The competition also includes the world premiere of Stillstand,...

Updated with juror names and winner of 2023 Points North Pitch.

Earlier: A first-time filmmaker has claimed the top prize at the 19th Annual Camden Film Festival in Maine, one of the country’s foremost all-documentary festivals.

Director Yousef Srouji earned the Harrell Award for Three Promises, a film set in the Occupied Territories. “At the start of the 2000s, the Israeli army retaliated against the second intifada in the West Bank,” notes a description of the documentary. “All the while, Suha, a mother of two young children, decides it’s time to start a film diary. Years later, her youngest son Yousef picks up the archive and discovers the difficult choices she faced then. The three promises, made and broken, evidence the strong love of a mother to her children, to her land, and to herself. The result is a reflexive act of love in a time capsule.”

‘Three Promises...

Nearly 150 documentaries set to screen at festival in South Korea.

South Korea’s Dmz International Documentary Film Festival (Dmz Docs) has overhauled its programme structure ahead of its 15th edition, which will open with Maite Alberdi’s The Eternal Memory.

A total of 147 documentaries, comprising 83 features and 64 shorts, from 54 countries will be screened at the festival from September 14-21 at cinemas in and around Goyang city, near the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea, in Gyeonggi Province.

The programme, which previously included the Global Vision and Dmz Open Cinema sections, have been reorganised into three competition strands: International, Frontier and Korean.

The Romanian film festival runs June 9-18.

Transilvania International Film Festival has announced the line-up for its 22nd edition which takes place in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

The official competition is made up of 12 features while the documentary strand, entitled What’s Up Doc?, will screen 10 titles. All of the films are from first and second-time directors.

Among the competition selection is Ion Bors’ Carbon which premiered in San Sebastian’s New Directors strand last year, having won the festival’s Wip Europa Industry and Wip Europa awards the previous year. The dark comedy, surrounding the Transnistrian conflict of the 1990s, is...

“While the Green Grass Grows” by Peter Mettler won the Grand Prix of the International Feature Film Competition at the 54th edition of Visions du Réel, in Nyon, Switzerland, on Friday.

The Swiss-Canadian director was competing with an unusual project: made in the form of a diary filmed from 2019 to 2021, “While the Green Grass Grows” is in fact a series of seven episodes with a total duration of about 11 hours. It was the finished parts one and six of the series, totalling 166 minutes, that were unveiled in world premiere at Visions du Réel and running for the Grand Prix.

The whole project was also presented in the Work-in-Progress section in order to find other financing and distribution platforms to finalize the remaining parts, which have already been widely edited. This is the second time that Mettler has won the Grand Prix at Visions du Réel, after his victory in 2002 with “Gambling,...

The Swiss documentary festival runs April 21-April 30.

Swiss-Canadian director Peter Mettler won the $22,000 grand jury prize of the international competition with While The Green Grass Grows at Switzerland’s documentary festival Visions du Réel in Nyon today (April 28).

The project, described as “a free-flowing meditation on life, death and what lies beyond” in Screen’s review, will consist of seven parts once completed – two of which were presented as a world premiere at the festival. maximage are handling international sales. This is the second time Mettler has won this award.

Knit’s Island, shot entirely from inside a video game and directed by Ekiem Barbier,...

People used to say, “There are worlds out there”, while gesturing to the horizon. These days, we could just as easily say, “There are worlds in there”, while gesturing to our computers. This documentary by Ekiem Barbier, Guilhem Causse and Quentin L'Helgouac'h - shot entirely within virtual reality - takes us to one of them.

Last year Joe Hunting’s [film]We Met in Virtual Reality/fllm] explored a virtual world of socialising but the landscape encountered by the French directors - who previously stepped into gaming spaces with short Marlowe Drive - is very different. Knit’s Island is a post-Apocalyptic place in the game DayZ, where those who visit roleplay survivalism, banding together or taking others on as well as fighting the zombies which roam about the place.

As with almost any social space, real world or otherwise, the filmmakers - who spent 963 hours within the environs of the game -.

“Knit’s Island,” the sophomore feature by French trio Ekiem Barbier, Guilhem Causse and Quentin L’helgoualc’h, competing in the Burning Lights sidebar at Swiss international doc fest Visions du Reél, has been picked up by Vienna-based film sales company Square Eyes.

It is entirely shot in the online post-apocalyptic world of DayZ, a multiplayer survival video game set in the fictional post-Soviet Republic of Chernarus, where a mysterious plague has turned most of the population into violent zombies.

Under the guise of avatars, the three-member film crew entered this world and made contact with its players. Their goal was to show how the gaming world can be a place where players become part of a strong community, they tell Variety.

“We were really attracted by this story of gamers who get together, who don’t fit this stereotypical individual concept of a gamer,” says L’helgoualc’h. “For...

Argentinian filmmaker Lucrecia Martel is guest of honour at Swiss non-fiction festival

Swiss documentary festival Visions du Réel (VdR) has revealed the line-up for its 54th edition which opens with Juliette de Marcillac’s Nightwatchers and runs April 21-30.

The festival has programmed 163 films – including 82 world premieres.

Nightwatchers is part of the previously announced Grand Angle competition. Filmed at high-end ski resort Montgenèvre on the French-Italian border, it tells the story of volunteers trying to help migrants, and the authorities trying to catch them.

VdR’s flagship international competition has 14 competing films, including 12 world premieres and two international premieres.

Swiss...