Private Project

das REAL LIFE GAME - attempts at playing

SYNOPSIS (short)
In this film game, 5 white players, equipped with 5 camcorders, try to step out of their middle-class comfort zones in everyday life via trial & error. Or maybe jump out. Stumble out. The main point is movement.

SYNOPSIS (long)
We look at the white, nurtured, inherited, comfort zones that hold us back. In small steps we try to leave them.
In the time of the game, 2016 to 2018, we, the 5 players, are between 15 and 55 years old. By giving each other tasks and asking each other questions, a performative self-experiment as well as a filmic experiment emerge.
Images of everyday observation, small moments of escape and micro-adventures all alternate. Sometimes it makes you smile, and it also kind of hurts at the same time. We film our most depressing everyday places, get to know our left and right neighbors, get lost in the woods at night or read our secret poems. We make confessions about our own German, potato-headed thinking, alone in front of the camera or in conversation.
The 5 game participants try and fail, together and alone, to get out of their own heads– for example through playful little everyday tasks like this: “Let an unknown person interview you. Film yourself doing it.”
This film is a cocktail in the color of shrill sunny yellow German living rooms, student-white woodchip wallpaper and dark green suburban forest mixed with sudden neon disco lights.

  • Project Title (Original Language):
    das Real Life Game SPIELVERSUCHE
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Experimental, Other
  • Genres:
    video diary, film game, essay
  • Runtime:
    1 hour 33 minutes
  • Completion Date:
    March 31, 2022
  • Country of Origin:
    Germany
  • Country of Filming:
    Germany, Italy, Morocco, Switzerland
  • Language:
    English, German, Italian
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    Yes - Academy of Media Arts
Director Biography

Rike Hoppe (* 1992) writes and makes experimental films that tend to move in the border area between documentary and fictional formats.
From 2012 to 2016 Rike studied philosophy and social and cultural anthropology at the Free University of Berlin. Since 2016 she has studied media arts at the Academy of Media Art Cologne.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

In the beginning there was the realization: I complain a lot about the world - but I myself don't do enough because I've been given learned fears about my everyday life and have accepted them unquestioningly, fears which really have nothing to do with my own experience.
The idea was to get out of the space of fear through a filmic and performative game experiment together with other people in a similar situation.
We asked ourselves questions about the origin of our fears and the non/sense of certain rules, and from there developed tasks for one another.
Filmed from a point-of-view perspective reminiscent of PC games, our well-resourced, German middle-class worlds are transformed into an analog playing field in the film. Mental and physical borders that separate us protagonists from other worlds become audible and visible.
It led me to experience and to film those parts of myself that keep me from doing things, but also those parts that make me do things: looking at everyday life in game mode.