Experiencing Interruptions?

Platform

Luis is a Deliveroo driver in Berlin who meets a very strange customer. Ramesh delivers for Uber Eats in Hong Kong and is lured into a trap. Hiro is working for Amazon Flex while pursuing his acting career when he receives a surprising offer from Amazon Studios. They are all connected through the chat function of an online pizza delivery simulator. They're up to something. Only what?

  • Steffen Köhn
    Director
  • Johannes Büttner
    Director
  • Steffen Köhn
    Writer
  • Paola Calvo
    Producer
  • Phillip Kaminiak
    Producer
  • Patrick Jasim
    Producer
  • Kumar Muniandy
    Key Cast
  • Roberto Anjari
    Key Cast
  • Boris Dikelo
    Key Cast
  • Project Type:
    Animation, Experimental, Short
  • Runtime:
    16 minutes 28 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    July 10, 2021
  • Production Budget:
    50,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    Germany
  • Shooting Format:
    Arri Alexa Mini, 2K
  • Aspect Ratio:
    2:1
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • SLAMDANCE
    Park City
    United States
    January 25, 2022
    World Premiere
  • MAX OPHÜLS PREIS
    Saarbrücken
    Germany
    January 25, 2022
    National Premiere
  • FILMFEST DRESDEN
    Dresden
    April 5, 2022
  • CineGlobe CERN
    Geneva
    Switzerland
    July 1, 2022
Director Biography - Steffen Köhn, Johannes Büttner

Steffen Köhn
(*1980), lives and works in Berlin.
www.steffenkoehn.com

Steffen Köhn is a filmmaker, anthropologist and video artist who uses ethnography to understand contemporary sociotechnical landscapes. For his research-based video- and installation works he engages in local collaborations with digital workers, designers, fellow artists, software developers, or science fiction writers to explore viable alternatives to current distributions of technological access and arrangements of power. His works have been shown at the Academy of the Arts Berlin, Kunsthaus Graz, Vienna Art Week, Hong Gah Museum Taipei, Lulea Biennial, and the ethnographic museums of Copenhagen and Dresden. His films have been screened (among others) at the Berlinale, Rotterdam International Film Festival, and the Word Film Festival Montreal.

Johannes Büttner
(*1985), lives and works in Berlin and Amsterdam.
www.johannes-buettner.com

Johannes Büttner is working in the tradition of performance and social organisation. He explores the generalised precarity of our age: whether through considerations of energy, urbanity, new-agism, esotericism or global and political crises. Questions of authorship and the relationship between labour, craftsmanship and conceptual art in a collaborative work practice are central to his installations and performances. Recently he participated in the 16th Istanbul Biennial (2019) and in exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2018), at La Panacée in Montpellier (2018) and at Basis in Frankfurt am Main (2017). In 2020 he won the C.o.C.a Commission prize which is connected to a solo exhibition at A tale of a Tub in Rotterdam. In 2018, he had solo exhibitions at Kunstraum C28 in Hannover and at Simultanhalle in Cologne. He showed performances at the Stedelijk Museum (2017), De Appel Art centre (2017) and the Art Weekend (2017) in Amsterdam. From 2015 – 2017 Büttner was a resident at De Ateliers in Amsterdam.

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Director Statement

Is yesterday’s science fiction today’s social documentary? Consider this: Firstly, Amazon, the most valuable company on Earth thanks to a business model that has produced a new delivery sector precariat, has just invested $575 Million in the food delivery company Deliveroo, with plans to overtake it in the future. Secondly, and simultaneously, the company’s entertainment division has bought the rights to adapt Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash as a series, a dystopian science fiction classic from 1992 depicting a future society shaped by unfettered ‘anarcho-capitalism’ and digital technology. Its story follows Hiro Protagonist, a freelance hacker and pizza delivery driver who works for CosaNostra Pizza, a mafia-owned business that guarantees delivery within 30 minutes - or else the driver will be executed. Hence, the very company that brought us the precarious working conditions in the delivery sector now wants to sell us the ironic exaggeration of these conditions as entertainment.

Platform asks how much this dystopian cyberpunk capitalist nightmare resembles the real-life capitalist nightmare we already came to inhabit. It is based on extensive ethnographic research and interviews with freelancers on gig-economy platforms like Deliveroo, Amazon Flex, and Uber Eats through which we explored the precarious working conditions in the global gig economy as well as the gamification strategies these platforms use to make work feel like one big competitive game. Our film intertwines the stories of our research participants with elements from Stephenson’s novel to create a looping narrative that indiscernibly moves from the documentary to the fictitious, drawing the audience ever deeper into the absurdities and abysses of these new work realities. Eschewing a conventional documentary aesthetics, the drivers’ stories are staged as film scenes that create a Sci-Fi representation of their work experiences and labor struggles. Mixing live-action footage with material generated with the computer graphics engines of popular computer games (a style of filmmaking known as machinima) we not only explore the increasingly blurred border between work and leisure, but also want to raise broader questions about immaterial work and value creation in the digital economy.