This film is part of OUT OF BOUNDS, a film program that takes a cue from ICED!: I Can End Deportation (2008), a role-playing video game in the ArteArchive that educates players on immigration laws on detention and deportation that affect legal permanent residents, asylum seekers, students, and undocumented people in the U.S.
The program comprises recent shorts by filmmakers Yanni Mohand Briki, Bahareh Khoshooee, Sara Sadik, and Firas Shehadeh, who take different approaches to retooling gaming software and their aesthetics. Presented together, their works showcase a range of potentials present in gaming as a mass medium–education, entertainment, escape, world building–and through modding and aesthetic interventions, the ability to also hijack meaning.
Bahareh Khoshooee’s MAXMOTIVES: Episode 1 (2020) is an ongoing web series that follows the life of seven alter egos and an unwanted newborn “non-resident alien,” filmed and produced in The Sims 2 video game.
Part of Firas Shehadeh’s ongoing research into video games and Palestinian youth culture, Like An Event In A Dream Dreamt By Another — Rehearsal (2023) combines footage of Twitch streamers and custom game mods for Grand Theft Auto V to explore how players simulate life under occupation.
Also using Grand Theft Auto V, Sara Sadik’s Khtobtogone (2021) is a character study of protagonist Zine, who wrestles with heartbreak while reflecting more broadly on masculinity and coming of age in Marseille’s Maghrebi community.
The program closes with Yannis Mohand Briki’s Yesterday was my birthday so I asked for legs to run away (2025), which considers the fate of video game characters left behind by players, serving as both a meditation on virtual obsolescence and an elegy for the optimism of the late 2000s.
OUT OF BOUNDS is co-presented by ArteEast and Millennium Film Workshop, and guest curated by May Makki. This program is part of ArteEast’s legacy program Unpacking the ArteArchive, which presents films from the ArteArhive in dialogue with contemporary voices. The films will be screened in-person at Millennium Film Workshop on June 17th followed by a discussion with Bahareh Khoshooee moderated by the curator.
Film program:
MaxMotives (S1 E1), Bahareh Khoshooee, USA/Iran, 2020, 6 mins
English with Persian Subtitles
MaxMotives (S1 E1) follows the lives of seven alter-egos and an unwanted “non-resident alien” newborn. Filmed and produced entirely within The Sims 2 video game—with minimal post-production manipulation—the piece adopts the visual and narrative aesthetics of reality television to investigate the uncanny underpinnings of the everyday.
Drawing from mainstream storytelling tropes, MaxMotives uses humor and hyperbole to stage a surreal domestic drama where even the most mundane actions become uncanny spectacles. Season One centers on fears surrounding the “other,” alongside conservative and stereotypical ideals of what it means to be a “good mother.”
The narrative unfolds as the characters question the legitimacy and origin of the non-resident alien newborn—a term lifted from U.S. immigration policy referring to non-citizen visa holders. Taken literally, “alien” invokes both pop-cultural imaginings of extraterrestrials and the real-world anxieties of xenophobia. By merging these interpretations, MaxMotives exposes how fear of the unknown—whether fantastical or bureaucratic—manifests in social, familial, and political structures.
Like An Event In A Dream Dreamt By Another—Rehearsal, Firas Shehadeh, Palestine, 2023, 14 mins
English with English Subtitles
In RPGs (role-playing game), one could say that real life can be rehearsed in a superstitious manner, with supernatural beings and worlds. Since the emergence of computer processing power and video games, the third world was a source for worldbuilding and space to apply game operations. Those games are not isolated from the socio-cultural and political environment that they are developed in. On the other hand, third-world gamers, developers, streamers, and hackers managed to modify those games and apply their own hyperreality in order to rehearse their world. This project explores how Palestinian players, GTA mods, and servers are simulating real life under colonial rule. Like An Event In A Dream Dreamt By Another – Rehearsal examines Los Santos as a corollary to Palestine.
Commissioned by Singapore Art Museum.
Khtobtogone, Sara Sadik, France, 2021, 16 mins
French with English Subtitles
Khtobtogone is an intimate portrait of Zine, a 20-year-old young man striving to become the best version of himself before asking his girlfriend to marry him. Created using machinima with the Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V) engine, the film follows Zine through his daily life, exploring his romantic relationships, friendships, and emotional struggles. He is torn between his desire to find self-love, gain confidence, and live up to his personal expectations. Inspired by the story of Ahmed Ra’ad Al Hamid, Khtobtogone uses the virtual world of the game to reflect the challenges of a man seeking to realize himself while confronting his aspirations and uncertainties. Through this digital universe, the film illustrates his efforts to overcome his weaknesses and find his place, while being caught in his own contradictions.
Yesterday was my birthday so I asked for legs to run away, Yannis Mohand Briki, France/Switzerland, 2024, 11 min
English with English Subtitles
In the film, we follow the monologue of a Sims child, speaking to someone who left the game long ago, abandoning the avatar to live alone in this digital ruin for years. Every day is their birthday—yet this seemingly joyful event takes on a more unsettling tone once we realize the infinite number of cakes symbolize the passage of time in a world where nothing ever changes. The flaming ruins of obsolete virtual worlds don’t gather dust; they remain exactly as we left them—vivid, colorful, and empty.
In this world, there was only one rule: don’t use the phone.
But unsupervised, the child—having seen a strange advertisement offering companionship for their birthday—breaks that sole rule and summons these mysterious guests.
In doing so, they unknowingly open a portal to disturbing creatures—digital anomalies that begin to corrupt the space of this simulation, which, despite its solitude, had remained peaceful. Now, this once-quiet virtual cocoon is under siege.
The child must flee toward the only person they’ve ever known: their creator.
But has the corruption brought by these dark guests altered their innocent intentions?
If they manage to escape the simulation, what might be the consequences of their sorrow turned to rage?
ICED! (I Can End Deportation) Videogame, Breakthrough (James Diamond, Cornelia Brunner), USA, 2008
Breakthrough, an international human rights organization, invited Education Development Center/Center for Children and Technology to complete an evaluation of “ICED! (I Can End Deportation),” a video game that teaches young people about the effects of American immigration and detention policies. The video game presents scenarios of five different immigrant teenagers and asks players to answer questions about immigration and deportation policies. The evaluation focuses on two measures of social impact: the extent that “ICED!” increases players’ knowledge about the U.S. immigration and detention policies and the extent to which players’ knowledge is influenced by the video game. The evaluation found that over half of players responded that playing the game changed their opinion of immigration and detention policies. The evaluators recommended that future games include questions that require application of information, instead of only asking “true/false” responses to questions. The evaluation of “ICED!” supports the role that video games can play in spreading awareness and influencing policy debates.
Biographies:
Yannis Mohand Briki is an artist and filmmaker working and living in Paris. Through installations and cinematic video, his work explores themes of solitude, apparition, and memory. The artist sheds light on the resurgence of personal memories as unique emotional archives. Through the camera lens, Yannis Briki creates figures that are both ambiguous and fierce, evolving within surrealistic settings that unveil the solitude of characters wandering through the maze of their memories, occasionally flirting with the edge of madness.
His approach questions the solitude of these characters within their memories, delving into the themes of love and despair, and examining the resurgence of personal memories as emotional archives that shape common identities through the dreamlike world of myths and legends.
Firas Shehadeh is a Palestinian artist. His work engages with worldbuilding, meaning, aesthetics, and identity after/on the Internet. His practice explores the post-colonial condition through the lens of technology, history, and speculative realities. He holds a Master of Fine Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Shehadeh’s work has been presented internationally at institutions and festivals such as the 14th Mercosul Biennial (Brazil), Soft Centre (Naarm/Melbourne), Images Festival (Toronto), B7L9 (Tunis), Los Angeles Filmforum, unsafe+sounds (Vienna), London Short Film Festival, the 7th Singapore Biennale, and the 64th Berlinale (Berlin).
Sara Sadik’s work explores the narrative and visual dimensions of video, installation, and immersive and interactive practices to construct stories where reality and fiction intertwine. Blending fiction and documentary, she stages initiatory journeys in which protagonists confront their desires, vulnerabilities, and aspirations within poetic, fantastical, and/or futuristic universes. Rooted in contemporary popular culture (video games, science fiction, French rap, manga, and reality TV) she imagines fables where contemporary identities, collective narratives, and forms of memory are reexamined, redefined, and reinvented. Her approach is based on a collaborative method, enriched by the personal stories of teenagers and young men rooted in specific social contexts. By reinterpreting everyday symbols, she transforms the mundane into fertile ground, where each detail contributes to a poetic vision of reality. Her work has been presented at Luma Arles, Villa Médicis, the Singapore Art Museum, Jameel Arts Centre, the Lyon Biennale, MACRO Museum, Munchmuseet, and Manifesta 13.
Bahareh Khoshooee is a multidisciplinary artist, feminist activist, educator, and the co-founder of two collectives –Blockbusters (an international group of New Media artists), and [Redacted] (a network of feminist activists). Born in Tehran, Iran, Khoshooee uses time-based strategies in presenting work that fuses 3D environments, video projection mapping, sculpture, performance, and sound. Her practice explores the complex dualities of technology: its oppressive role in surveilling, documenting, and criminalizing BIPOC bodies, and its radical potential for futurity and alternative solidarities. Her work unearths how technology mediates the intimate and collective experiences of grief, violence, and memory, reclaiming these spaces as arenas for liberation, and reimagined futures.
Khoshooee is the recipient of Eyebeam’s Democracy Machine Fellowship and a Skowhegan alumna. She has presented her solo installations at the Dorothy Center for The Arts, Baxter St CCNY, The Elizabeth Foundation for The Arts,The Orlando Museum of Art,and NADA MIAMI 2018 among others. Khoshooee has been included in various group exhibitions including the Honor Fraser Gallery, Latinx Project, Southern Exposure, Museum of Photography Stockholm, and the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg. Her work has been featured in The Huffington Post, The Guardian, Artnet News, The Metro, and The Creators Project.
For twenty years, Let’s Breakthrough Inc. (Breakthrough) has harnessed the power of media and popular culture to spark conversations and transform norms around gender, racial justice, sexuality, and immigrant rights. As a society, we consume culture. It’s an integral part of every-day life. Culture consumption is where Breakthrough seizes the opportunity for change. We reject cultural norms, practices, and products that perpetuate violence and discrimination. In their place, we produce and amplify media, arts, and technology that promote core human rights, including dignity, equality, and respect.