R U There

Year: 2010
Country: NETHERLANDS, TAIWAN, FRANCE
Run Time: 83 minutes

Twenty-year-old Jitze is a cocky Dutch professional video gamer in Taipei for a tournament. During his downtime he works out in the hotel gym, monitors his nutrition, develops game plans with his teammates, and practices for hours on end. When his shoulder starts hurting, he's unable to compete. Frustrated, he goes walking through the alien, garish streets. He needs to be on the move, much like the characters in the games he understands better than real people. When he witnesses a fatal accident, Jitze's tunnel vision starts opening up and he realizes his life is missing something. He meets an aloof local named Min Min, whom he follows to her job as a "betel nut girl." It's a bizarre profession, unique to Taiwan: scantily-clad beauties wait in elevated, neon-lit glass kiosks for men to drive by and purchase nuts. Min Min rejects Jitze's tentative advances, suggesting they hook up instead in the online game Second Life. No longer lost in translation, their avatars are able to meet briefly as friends. R U THERE asks, "Will the increasingly virtual nature of your life contribute to your gradual alienation from humanity?" (In Dutch and English with subtitles) –B.B.

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