Running. Rapid breathing. A shot in the silence. The opening strikes the keynotes: caution, curiosity, thrills. A documentary film team spend 963 hours on the adventure playground of the video game DayZ. Online gamers explore the territory of a post-Soviet disaster province, permanently exposing themselves to the risk of being killed by hostile gamers. Despite their “press” badges, Guilhem, Ekiem and Quentin, as avatars, are subject to the same rules when they interview the gamers in their virtual world. The community is heterogenous: marauding gangs, cowboys with Samaritan ethics, curious wanderers.

Reality is never far away. The gamer “Feesh” is torn from her console during the interview because her IRL (in real life) child is crying. In the course of their conversation, “Iris” shoots her “toy”, a prisoner, before the eyes of the shocked documentary team – a conflict of documentary work opens up. “Knit’s Island” is a disturbing, melancholy to heartwarming tour of chance meetings and friendships of sleepless persons in the artificial world. Some avatars constantly twitch nervously and grotesquely because they act out darkest desires. Others “trick the game” and enter fascinating techno-psychedelic spheres. Game-playing and role-playing persona – sometimes they are one, sometimes two.

The stag in the bedroom painting vigorously stomps on the grass and the father wakes up. His wife and baby are still asleep. In worn-out boxer shorts that reveal one lost-looking testicle, he begins his daily battle with the electric metre which only closes its snapping jaws when it is fed enough banknotes. Mykyta Lyskov’s film is a scathing, incredibly funny and deeply sad portrait of the precarious pre-2022 life of a Ukrainian family. He uses anthropomorphic and surrealist exaggeration to bring home their poverty, and countless cultural references to raise questions of belonging and national pride.
In Lyskov’s film, everything stays bleak, as if 1990 was not so long ago: endless canyons of prefabricated buildings, garbage, lack of perspective. No wonder then that the father guards his passport like a veritable treasure and flutters away as a small yellow-blue bird to work in Western Europe. He leaves behind his wife, who ingeniously keeps the greedy electric metre at bay, while the son grows up to become a hooligan. It is absolutely outrageous that this family, sort of re-united around the kitchen table in this hopeless hodgepodge, is forced to watch as a bomb coming out of nowhere demolishes the building opposite. It is fantastic that Lyskov captures this for us with so much exuberant rage.