Playing God

Playing God tells about the tormented search of a blind sculptor immersed in the darkness of his atelier, which is surrounded by countless failed sculpture experiments. He once again tries to give shape to a human figure in plasticine, sculpting with the energy of every single muscle. His work is finally successful and the creature comes to life. While the Sculptor analyses the work, he is dissatisfied; he cannot see the perfection in her despite the vitality he has succeeded in instilling in her through the generative act of creation. He is blind due to the loss of objectivity and love for his original artistic research. In the end, he abandons her like the other copies of her, cold and detached, careless of the feelings of the creature that he himself has generated, leaving her to her fate and relegating her to a state of failure. The sculpture, on the contrary, is unable to do anything but love its creator and in a last and desperate attempt to rejoin him, tries to reach him but fails.

Director’s statement
This story is about failure. Each of us experiences it, in a continuous cycle of making mistakes and learning from them. How fundamental are these failures in the path of our personal growth? With this question in mind, I chose to stage this concept through the metaphor of art and the artist. They live symbiotically, representing the two sides of the same coin. All this takes place in a dark set, an atelier, where a sculptor carries out his obsessive research modelling his umpteenth clay sculpture. The protagonist of the story is the sculpture: it will feel pain at its birth and its death. It will be afraid, not understanding where it is, and will feel love as it recognizes the sculptor as its father. Humanity and feeling will, therefore, reside in the creation and not vice-versa, with the sculpture representing the direct transfiguration of man, who is represented by the artist.