Second Skin takes an intimate look at three sets of computer gamers whose lives have been transformed by online virtual worlds. An emerging genre of computer software called Massively Multiplayer Online games, or MMOs, allows millions of users to interact simultaneously in virtual spaces. Of the 50 million players worldwide, 50 percent consider themselves addicted.
When Werner Herzog was still a child, his father was beaten to death before his eyes. His mother was overwhelmed with his upbringing and thereupon shipped him off to one of the toughest youth welfare institutions in Freistatt. This was followed by a career as a bouncer in the city's most notorious music club and an attempt to start a family. Today, the 77-year-old from Bielefeld lives with his dog Lucky in a lonely house in the country. Despite adverse living conditions, he has survived in his own unique and inimitable way.
Cao Fei recorded her experiences within the online social platform Second Life. The result is a wistful, surreal vision of an alternative reality sprung from the pop culture fantasies and hyper-consumerism of contemporary urban China, while also trying to transcend its real-life limitations. It can be seen as an answer to the challenge posed by River Elegy: how to envision a new Chinese destiny founded on principles of individuality, creativity, discovery, and freedom. The film also reflects the contemporary condition of the virtual supplanting our experience of the real.
Laiila’s journey that looking for an answer to the questions that plagued her mind. In the middle of her journey, Ale comes to help Laiila to define what happiness truly is.
In a few clicks, they can connect girls, make new friends in Sydney or Bamako, become a videographer or photographer, show their buttocks to a virtual friend in Berlin, meet anorexics, put their music online hoping to become famous... Welcome to the new "teen planet", where, it seems, we are more comfortable in the digital jungle than in real life. Ready to do anything to become celebrities via the Net, like the "Suicide girls", young adults posing naked on the Web who have become real idols for young girls, teenagers chat, download and publish their content at a hundred per hour: a set of techniques and knowledge that their parents often master very badly. To better understand this silent revolution underway among teenagers, for whom the Web has become the symbol of a new way of life and a tool for self-promotion, Stéphanie Kaim went to meet some young cybernauts.
On the surface it is an idyll. He lives a happily married life with Judit, a teacher and their eight-year old son, Dani. His best friend, Zoli is also his business partner and between the two of them they own four flourishing bakeries in Budapest. An enviable setting. But in the background a time bomb is ticking away. For years Andris has been living a passionate and blessed second life. The scene is Poland. Pretending to be making business trips, he has been spending half the year in Cracow, with Bea. She is a beautiful young woman and a church-painter. In this life Andris paints Creation in the chapel near the city. He is sensitive and gifted in what he does. In Pest he is a talented businessman, in Cracow an excellent artist. It is as if there were two people in him. What's more: he is satisfied with both lives. And since he is also an excellent conspirator, until this early morning he has never had to make a choice. But now Bea is pregnant, and would like to marry him...
Caridad is a woman who lives disconnected from her reality due to the loss of her son, a situation she has not been able to overcome since then, so she enters an emotional state in which reality and fiction combine with each other, preventing She can distinguish between them.