Chapter IV
Practical Project - Luna 28
Luna is an independent film that investigates the confusion between
reality and unreality. The film works synergistically with the text, creating a
body of work that conducts research in the same direction, pursuing the same
target but from different perspectives. It was apposite to use images and
words, practice and theory, the subjective experience of the diegetic
character concerning the confusion of reality and unreality and what is
generally held to be the ‘objective’ concepts of academic formality in a
complementary and mutually beneficial endeavour. The theory is thus
‘translated’ into facts to see if the academic discourses - social, philosophical
and cinematographic theories - can be applied to everyday life, or, in other
words, to examine if the scholarly vision of our society is accurate, or, if it
reflects a non representable dimension of our culture. Central to the film,
however, is precisely the confusion of reality and unreality and the use and
influence of technology in this confusion, a phenomenon oscillating at the
crux of the various discourses presented in the thesis.
This film is not a SF production; nevertheless the structure of the film
maintains some common elements with the SF productions examined in this
research including The Matrix, Total Recall and eXistenZ. Thus, Victor’s
(Vicente Diaz Gandasegui) perfectly normal life is altered by an incident that
produces confusion about the (un)reality in which he is living. Victor, like
Neo, Quaid and Allegra Geller has to deal with the new circumstances of his
life and the confusion of not being able to differentiate between what is real
and what is unreal. With each of these characters it is technology that plays a
fundamental part in provoking such confusion, being the origin and the
medium to be (un)consciously confused. Luna is a story that ‘belongs’ to our
society and at the same time shows the inner concerns of our society,
specifically our incapacity to deal with the attributes intrinsic to new
technology. The experiences narrated in Luna are not intended to be
applicable to every single individual but to capture a more general social and
28 The original script is included in the appendix.
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