和平里通关
Hepingli Playthrough

和平里通关

Hepingli Playthrough

36 minutes 42 seconds, Single-channel HD video, color, sound, 2024

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Hepingli Playthrough（和平里通关） is a pseudo-documentary that mimics a game playthrough video. Borrowing the aesthetics of text-based adventure games that were once popular in the 1990s. The film creates a fictitious world that connotes seemingly discrete moments from the recent past and the speculated future into a retrievable archive, wherein it parodies the irreversibility of history, resonating from remembrance to amnesia, crisis to banal, a dystopia to the chance of a new start.

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In this simulated playthrough of a non-existent video game in the style of (and with original material from) 90s text adventures, an internal monologue reflects on the surroundings and state of the world. Non-chronologically alternating between chapters in the present and near or distant future, the player chooses between different options to progress. A nostalgic play on what we decide to forget and remember moving forward. Are you sure you want to overwrite this savefile?

 

– Loes van Keulen

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