Zoom: Total Refusal + Discussion

The Inak Cinema will host a lecture, a selection of their films including their latest The World at Stake (2025), which premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival. The screening will be followed by a Q&A in English with members of the collective. The lecture is free to attend.

Programme:

• 17:00 Lecture
• 19:00 Screening

Total Refusal is a pseudo-marxist guerrilla collective focused on artistic intervention and appropriation of mainstream video games. They upcycle video games in order to expose the political apparatus behind the glossy and hyperreal textures of these media.

Since its founding in 2018, the collective has won numerous awards such as the Diagonale Film Award for Best Short Documentary, the Contemporary Visual Arts Award of Styria Province and the Vimeo Staff Pick Award, among others. Total Refusal has been screened at more than 130 film and video festivals, such as Berlinale (2020), Doc Fortnight at MOMA New York and IDFA Amsterdam (2018), and has been exhibited in various exhibition spaces, such as the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021, HEK Basel (2020) and Ars Electronica Linz (2019). Their short film Hardly Working won the European Short Film Award 2023 at the 36th edition of the European Film Awards.

The event was financially supported by the Austrian Cultural Forum. The public funding was supported by the Bratislava City Foundation and the Bratislava – Old Town Municipality. The digitisation of Cinema otherwise was financially supported by the Audiovisual Fund.