‘Knit’s Island’: Visions du Reel Review

Dirs. Ekiem Barbier, Guilhem Causse, Quentin l’Helgoualc’h. France. 2022. 95mins 

The synthetic survivalist worlds of online video games like ‘DayZ’, ‘Rust’ and ‘Arma3’ might appear brutal and unforgiving to some, but they also build communities and offer players an alternative reality in which to live and prosper. Mimetic and yet somehow also organic, there is an elusive allure to these uncanny, apocalyptic worlds. Armed with cameras instead of guns, Ekiem Barbier, Guilhem Causse and Quentin l’Helgoualc’h spent a collective 963 hours in survivalist game ‘DayZ’ in an effort to document their fiction. Far from the violence the game is predicated upon, Knit’s Island is a gentle enquiry into the reality of the video game world which yields fascinating results.

Two kinetic modes define Knit’s Island: combat and patrol

Expanding upon the idea from their first (short) film together, Marlowe Drive (a documentary filmed inside ’Grand Theft Auto’), Barbier, Causse and l’Helgoualc’h, who met at Beaux-Arts de Montpellier university, capture both the people and the environments of popular online video games through sequences from ‘DayZ’. Begun before the pandemic but filmed during some of its lockdowns, Knit’s Island explores timely themes of isolation and community. This focus, along with its contemporary and almost futuristic aesthetic, will likely appeal to younger audiences and should help its chances of further festival play and potential distribution following its bow in Visions du Reel’s Burning Lights competition.

Two kinetic modes define Knit’s Island: combat and patrol. Only a little time is spent on the former; an occasional zombie is picked off by a player to demonstrate the purpose of such gaming. But the second, less immediately compelling mode characterises most of the documentary. When players aren’t involved in combat, they study and tend to their environment, interacting with others. Mundane actions – the planting and growing of courgettes for sustenance, discussing the art in an abandoned church – are what make up the majority of time spent in the game. One player, known as Chill Pilgrim, says he has spent some 12,000 hours playing, most of it walking in the night’s silence after a day’s IRL work at the office, because “it’s soothing”. 

Simply walking around was also key to the filmmakers’ process. While they did contact some people on the outside, most of the encounters first took place within the game where they built up a network, each encounter directing them to more players. Their avatars speak into two-way radios to arrange interviews with notorious players like Iris from the game’s Dark as Midnight group. The heavily armed vigilante crew “do what the fuck we want, when we want, where we want and how we want,” because “it’s fun killing people.” Such encounters, fraught with danger, give the film tension: one wrong step and it’s game over. 

And at one point, it really is: “Don’t shoot, I’m a documentarist!” we hear one of the filmmakers shout shortly before the screen goes black. But, unlike IRL, where war documentarians are at very real risk of danger, dying in the game world is only a minor setback, and one that a quick reset can remedy. It is this ultimate inconsequential nature of the game world that makes it so appealing: “It’s a giant playground,” Iris muses. 

This pop philosophy continues to ring painfully true. Feesh, a player quizzed about game life versus her real life says, “You learn that you can’t take life for granted; every day is a gift, and you might not be here tomorrow.” Ironically, she spends most of her time IRL in her basement in order to live inside the game world; she pauses her interview to attend to her actual child who has fallen and can be heard crying in the background. The camera lingers on her vacant avatar, hammering home the point that, while you can choose to be anyone inside the game, reality is inescapable. 

What sets the viewer experience apart from the player’s is Nicolas Bancilhon’s sharp edits which leap through time and space and, even, between camera angles – in one scene he cuts between a go-pro attached to the avatar of one of the filmmaker’s heads while a second camera takes up a standing vantage from the opposite side of the room. The shifting perspective along with cinematic pans and zooms – especially of exteriors – give the documentary a more filmic touch. Silence and chatter are occasionally interrupted by the subtle notes from Barbier, Causse and Marc Siffer’s original score where string instruments underline emotion, adding a melancholic tone.

Though it is a far cry from the cinema of giants like Malick and Tarkovsky, there are moments where the influence of classic cinema is present, from the lingering focus on reeds swaying in the “breeze” to the gentle ripple of water over stones in prolonged close-up of a stream. Somehow cinematic yet ultimately uncanny, Knit’s Island is a 95-minute glimpse of the end of the world.