Event

SLIFF - The Institute

The Institute

Spencer McCall, U.S., 2012, 91 min.

Sunday, Nov. 18, 6 p.m., Webster U./Moore

Like "Exit Through the Gift Shop," the mind-warping "The Institute" blurs and sometimes entirely erases the line between fiction and nonfiction by examining a San Francisco-based alternate-reality game in which thousands of participants get far more than they expected. When they respond to mysterious handbills posted in the Bay Area, players are immersed in the philosophy of Nonchalance at the Jejune Institute and sent down a series of ever-stranger and more elaborately constructed rabbit holes. Told from the players' perspectives, the film looks over the precipice at an emergent new art form where the real world and fictional narratives merge to create unforeseen and often unsettling consequences. The film discloses a world whose secret identity may mean the difference between enlightenment and total incomprehension.

With director McCall.