Lou Fauroux's WhatRemains, Genesis screens at MUTEK Forum
Set in 2048, the film gives Google a cure for death — until hackers leak the source code to everyone. In Montreal Wednesday, with a Q&A to follow.
It is 2048, Google owns most of the planet, and death has finally been productized. In WhatRemains, Genesis, French filmmaker Lou Fauroux imagines digital immortality software hoarded by an elite of the rich and powerful until hackers seize the source code and hand it to everyone else. The 19-minute film screens Wednesday, August 26 at MUTEK Forum in Montreal, with an artist Q&A to follow.
Fauroux is a visual artist, filmmaker, and DJ who came to moving image sideways — through a community of porn producers and performers encountered in Los Angeles, and before that through a childhood of MTV spectacle, pirated American series, and Tumblr rabbit holes. Fauroux self-describes as "a true product of bedroom culture," and that is exactly the sensibility the film runs on: the internet's found materials, reassembled into queer mythology. Since premiering at Cinéma du Réel in 2023, the film has traveled to festivals in Thailand, Spain, and New York; Fauroux announced the Montreal stop in July.
Here is why this one is ours: Fauroux treats platforms the way game artists treat engines, as material with politics baked in. Digital immortality is, after all, a respawn fantasy, and the film asks who gets the extra lives. The screening, presented by L'Euguélionne, a Montreal feminist bookstore, at a forum themed "Symbiotic Frequencies," shows how far outside the games-industry frame this conversation is happening — which is precisely where we like to find it. The film screens in English with French subtitles; the Q&A runs in French with live transcription.
Artists bending corporate tools toward collective ends is a Killscreen through-line — see our conversation on Sahej Rahal's AI instruments and cooperative creatures.
Killscreen covers the artists building futures out of games’ parts — at film forums and festivals as often as on storefronts. The free newsletter delivers them weekly.
