“Real offers us space to think, similar to a museum installation. Tulli wants to stimulate ideas rather than provide answers – to questions that we do not want to deal with or do not have the time to do so.”
The second feature film by Italian director Adele Tulli Real uses its documentary format to provide a comprehensive overview of the current digital landscape, how technology has infiltrated every aspect of the human experience and whether we may be on the verge of speciation – a fundamental mutation and rewiring of ourselves. Real is presented as a film essay that cuts together footage from different sources, but admirably without voiceover, leaving viewers to draw their own conclusions. It is not unlike the now frequently feature-length video essays seen on YouTube and other platforms from content creators. Real’The high production quality and the global storylines make the film something very special.
Real begins with an imposing shot of the Covilhã Data Center in Portugal, an impressive brutalist building surrounded by a moat – a grounding image in the sense that the intangible, ephemeral internet is also powered by physical computers and hard drives. From there we launch into several of the storylines we follow Real. These storylines are loose vignettes that relate to a specific character or theme. There’s a “smart home” run by Samsung’s assistant Bixby, where an Asian family lives. The child asks questions, like who Bixby’s mother is, and, as befits the artificial intelligence, Bixby gives cryptic and evasive answers. There’s an adult OnlyFans performer doing an explicit livestream from her living room (real-life performer Migi Stardust); a delivery driver in Seoul livestreaming his everyday delivery runs and bike rides around the city on Twitch; a Busan Eco Delta Smart City project where a hundred families have the privilege of living rent-free for five years in a super-modern mini-city served entirely by AI robots, in exchange for the small trade-off of ceding all their data and privacy to the tech company running the project.
Other fascinating digressions arise. A significant part Real is devoted to simulated reality spaces in which people don VR sets and avatars as they navigate imaginary places. For many people, it’s a way to find their true selves and even romantic partners. A young man in Berlin checks himself into rehab for over-reliance on screens for over 16 hours a day, or roughly every waking moment—a circumstance that isn’t really far from any of us. Another nod to connectivity comes from the Hexatonic Cable Factory, which creates and lays the Ethernet cables that connect continents on the seafloor thousands of meters below. There are Zoom yoga classes and TikTok dances, channel-ending YouTube confessions and ASMR videos. Real is truly a compendium of all types of digital content and experiences available today.
Real also serves as an illustration of the digital film technology available today. There’s footage from drones, underwater photography, AI directional cameras, facial recognition equipment, and, most strikingly, 360-degree spherical cameras that distort the image to create trippy, hallucinogenic visuals – in addition to the traditional webcams, phone front-facing camera options, and Instagram filters available for filming today.
You may wonder for what purpose, and Tulli conscientiously does not represent any theory or thesis. In fact, in Real is novel because we are all so closely involved with technology on a daily basis that the opportunity to reflect is not really given or even necessary; technology is a fait accompli – the ship has sailed and AI will only accelerate our descent into the digital world. Even the one explicit point that Real that we are on the way to becoming altered, technology-dependent beings is not really enlightening or surprising, but rather an accepted sociological reality. Nevertheless, in a relaxed, undemanding 84 minutes, Real offers us space for contemplation, similar to a museum installation. Tulli wants to stimulate ideas rather than provide answers – to questions that we do not want to deal with or do not have the time to.
