Private Project

I can save her

"I can save her" allocates a mission from the video game The Last Of Us into a voice-over of an experimental short film, merging the narrative with the physical reality of the players’ bodies and the fictional landscape. How do missions that mediate emotions get under our skin, and affect our bloodstream, muscles, and organs while influencing our priorities and perception? With a proposition to rethink contemporary masculinity, the film slows down the game’s quest and brings the players’ bodies into a vacated atmosphere. It washes out saturated colors and a loaded soundtrack to point out the normalization and idealization of violence in media that reinforces the notion of an 'Other', an enemy. Time, color palette, and materiality of footages contribute to a methodology that questions the interactive action scenarios continually advertised by the big gaming investors and its interweaving with players’ perception apparatus.

The protagonists who are video game players in real life are moving by trying out the somatic practice. Elaborate animations of a fictional sublime landscape emerge through their bodies. The hero, only known by a distorted voice, encourages the protagonist to fulfill the mission by saying "I can save her".

  • Petra Mrša
    Director
  • Petra Mrša
    Writer
  • Igor Grubić
    Producer
  • Jakob Vučić-Šenperger
    Key Cast
  • Karlo Čulek
    Key Cast
  • Tomislav Zorjan
    Key Cast
  • Project Type:
    Animation, Experimental, Short
  • Runtime:
    11 minutes 25 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    May 29, 2023
  • Production Budget:
    25,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    Croatia
  • Country of Filming:
    Croatia
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    4K
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Petra Mrša

Petra Mrša’s lens-based media work arises from initiating and facilitating situations that implement rule-based scenarios that takes art context as a site to broaden and challenge the experience of self. Through thought and physical experiments imposed on herself and/or collaborators, her art process opens up the space for creating new realities in which horizontality, radical hospitality, and the acceptance of the unknown shape interpersonal dynamics. Acquired embodied knowledge celebrates vulnerability and imagination while its documentation offers ground to connect to not just other humans but to other-than-human intelligences as well.

Petra’s interest in broadening the behavior through self-imposed instructions brought her into a three years-long research on the video game medium that additionally served as a site to open a conversation about the mechanisms of socialization in virtual reality. As an artist and educator with a background in social science and art studies, her multidisciplinary and collaborative approach can be seen as a sustainable community research that joins the seek to repair the current damage and transforms the conditions of coexistence.

Petra Mrša holds a master degree in Photography (from Academy of Dramatic Arts), Sociology (from Faculty of Humanities and Social Science), and Psychology (from University Department of Croatian Studies). She was a first generation of the postgraduate art program WHW Akademija initiated by curatorial collective What, How & for Whom/WHW and was nominated for the Radoslav Putar award 2020. She took part in numerous residencies among which are MuseumsQuartier Wien, Cité internationale des arts, CreArt Bluecoat Liverpool's contemporary arts centre. Her work was exhibited at the OSTRALE Biennale (Dresden, Germany), Museum Kunst+Wissen (Switzerland), FOTODOK (The Netherlands), Galerie L'inlassable (France) among many others. Her artworks are in several collections. She works at the Department for photography at the Academy of Applied Arts in Croatia.

Add Director Biography