Synopsis
“What does it mean to live in this world, and also live in an alternative virtual world partly of your own creation? Artists know this divided life very well, but for the everyday people, the meaning is something different. Whether they are part of the “Furries,” or “Goreians” or fundamentalist Christians, the impulse to be free of life as we know it and plunge into a parallel universe and culture is profound and possibly all-consuming. And as genuine artists, Della Negra and Kinoshita, partners in several audiovisual projects, observe Second Life without judgment but with penetrating eyes and ears.” - Robert Koehler
A word from Tënk
From its first moments, The Cat, the Reverend and the Slave is dizzying. Using a fragmented cartography of eccentric virtual communities within the online video game Second Life, the filmmakers have developed a fascinating documentary on the porous boundary between the real world and its ever-encroaching digital chimera.
From the at-times ecstatic stories of experiences the film’s subjects have had online, The Cat, the Reverend and the Slave gradually builds into a strange and captivating ratio print. From the map to the land, from the interface to the soft matter of digital images, but also from the anonymous day-to-day in residential suburbs to the fantasy of a refuge beyond the reach of time and social mores, the filmmaker’s trajectory serves to narrow the divide between existence and “second lives.”
The film is impregnated with a sense of unreality, and its subjects’ avatars seem to alternate for one another, haunting a sensitive world that has become a crutch or prothesis to all these dreams. The Cat, the Reverend and the Slave expresses a conscious (and slightly alarming) take on the quiet abandonment of the old social world and its pre-determined dispersal into a digital limbo.
Terence Chotard
Filmmaker
