Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust

Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust

Gaspar Noé, Asia Argento and Soko in a dystopian city of the future

This is Schirkoa, the city of the future. Everyone here looks the same, and the government has achieved this by mandating people to wear paper bags on their heads. Yep, the same ones that supermarkets use. Individualism is condemned here, and lack of originality is promoted. Discrimination of misfits is their daily bread. In this reality, by a strange series of events, a humble clerk, dreaming of becoming a councilman, finds himself in the middle of a revolution and embarks on a journey to a utopian land where anyone can be themselves.

“Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust” is a surreal animation where the absurd pours out of every frame. If the style seems familiar to you, no wonder – it was created using the Unreal Engine. As critics point out, that makes a difference: the inhabitants of the world resemble NPCs, i.e. non-playable characters that create the “background” in video games.

This original film was directed by Ishan Shukla, who wrote the script for the feature-length version using his award-winning short of the same name for which he received an American Movie Award, and successfully toured the world’s festivals this year with his feature-length debut. He invited a surprising array of stars to lend their voices to the characters of “Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust.” The characters here speak with the accents of Gaspar Noé, Asia Argento, Soko and Shekhar Kapur. During the screening, you might notice links to “Blade Runner,” “Brazil,” “Soylent Green” and “1984”.