Welt am Draht

A street that's disappearing, a person no one can remember anymore. In Fassbinder's film adaptation of the novel "Welt am Draht" (World on a Wire), we follow a character whose world is gradually dissolving. Scene after scene, tiny cracks form, barely noticeable at the start, until eventually deep wounds open up in the fabric of reality. The protagonist becomes entangled in the threads of a collapsing reality. 

In "Welt am Draht", we experience the loss of reality as a painful process of discovery that culminates in the revelation that the world is a simulation, made up of pure data. But even without the simulation, in the post-pandemic world, we find ourselves in a reality where the order we were sure was a certainty seems to be falling apart. New authoritarianism, fascism, culture wars, new real wars, the decoupling of capitalism and liberal democracy. At the same time, companies using artificial intelligence promise us that they have created something that will lead us into a better future. In the present, this future primarily means overstimulation, the massive consumption of resources, circular flows of capital and a military industrial complex boosted by AI. 

Based on the novel by Daniel F. Galouye and the film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder (script written with Fritz Müller-Scherz), Luis August Krawen and his team attempt to find a form to express the paralysing feeling of witnessing the twilight of a fever-dreamlike late capitalism and go in search of the spirit of a world that is hanging not by a wire, but by a silk thread.