Pirated DVDs seed a lost-media hunt for every film ever made
Shanghai collective [[rect*]]repair built Screening Guidelines, a 150-player investigation of a cinema whose entire catalog disappeared
The audience filed in wearing paper masks, which was fair, because the cinema was wearing one too. On Sept. 12, the Shanghai collective [[rect*]]repair ran Screening Guidelines at China's FIRST film festival: a 150-player investigation of the Lujiatan Theatre, a semi-fictional Beijing cinema where every film ever screened has disappeared, leaving only reviews and secondhand accounts. The collective's documentation surfaced in late October.
Players booked seats on the theater's own website before arriving at the festival, were handed an unfinished set of screening guidelines, and completed it by investigating: digging through USB sticks, spotting pirated DVDs laid out on a blanket, telling real film posters from AI fakes, listening to MP3s for clues. The finale was a mandatory written quiz on details from the midnight screening, down to what operating system the protagonist's computer ran, before anyone was allowed to leave the theater. The premise is loosely based on an SCP Foundation entry.
The collective, whose profile reads simply "city infrastructure," has a history of IRL play in Shanghai, from VJ battles to a jam for alternate reality games, and institutional camouflage is its real craft. The Lujiatan Theatre's website is still live, in character and freshly updated, and a second investigation has already published its results, so the fiction keeps running without the festival.
Games have smuggled themselves into other art forms' festivals before, and Killscreen once traced the alternate reality game hidden around Oxenfree. What is different here is the host: a film festival running a game about cinema's own unreliable memory, pirated discs and all.
Props and stations from Screening Guidelines: a television relic, pirated DVDs, the guidelines themselves, a seat marker, the final quiz, the theater entrance. Photographs via [[rect*]]repair.
Killscreen hunts for play at the edges of other art forms, cinema included. The Radar finds things like this three times a week, free.
