“Shakespeare would write for games today”: Cannes' First Video Game Lili is a retelling of Macbeth | Gaming

The Cannes Film Festival is usually not connected to video games, but this year an unusual cooperation will take place. Lili is a co -production between the New York Game Studio Ink Stories (Creator of 1979 Revolution: Black Friday, about a photojournalist in Iran) and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and its abnormal translation of Macbeth into today's Iran is turned.

“It was an incredible coup d'état to have him as the first video game experience at Cannes,” says the co -founder of Ink Stories, Vassiliki Khonsari. “People said that I am not familiar with playing games, so I can only try it out for five minutes. […] But as soon as they are there, there is this growing feeling of authorization that people feel from the film world. “

The Immersive Competition of the Cannes Festival started in 2024, although the list usually does not contain traditional video games. “VR films and projection assignments are the thrust,” says the other co-founder of Ink Stories, Vassiliki's husband Navid Khonsari. But Lili weaves live action film material with video game mechanics in a similar way to a game as a game of telling lies or immortality. His leadership, Zar Amir Ebrahimi, won the best actress in Cannes three years ago.

Lili focuses on the history of Lady Macbeth, who was occupied here as a ambitious woman of an emerging mobile officer in the Basij (a paramilitary volunteer militia within the Islamic revolutionary guard in Iran). As in the play, she plans a murder to secure her husband's rise. “I think Lady Macbeth's story is that it is manipulative, and that is exactly what we were interested in,” says Navid.

“The social restrictions based on their gender forced them to try to achieve the leadership role they can,” he continues. “If she were a man, she would have been one of the greatest kings who had ever experienced the country, but because she was a woman, she had to be there for her. And I think this is the same that we have with our Lili figure: Because of society, she limits itself to how high it can increase.”

The player is occupied as a member of the Hecate Web, a group of hackers stand for Macbeth's witches, and they first access Lilis telephone and computer and observe them on CCTV cameras in their house. The suppression of monitoring and censorship is a central topic. At some point, Lili tries to access a YouTube make -up tutorial just to be blocked by the state's firewall. The fact that the player takes on an unpleasant voyeuristic role is intended. “We are all part of the problem when it comes to surveillance when it comes to looking at each other and spying on each other,” says Navid.

You can avoid it to grant your access, which asks an unforgettable scene in which she includes the head in clean film before applying eyeliner and lipstick. “This is her ritual that uses make -up in a world that she cannot do [in]Without knowing her husband or someone else, “says Vassiliki.” We love it as this kind of allegory that she suffocates in the world and in the different layers of masks that she has to put on … Our Lady Macbeth, our purple, has a awakening and all these tools we have used to hack them to actually help them. “

Lili is to be released at the end of 2026 and the Sarah Ellis of the RSC says that it may be transformed into a piece at some point in the future. According to Navid, there are already plans for a film version in which some of the same film materials are used for the game – a memory that the boundaries between the worlds of games, films and theater are increasingly porous. It is unlikely that the RSC last time is involved in games.

“I was always interested in games and the convergence of games and theater,” says Ellis, who originally spoke to ink with the idea for this collaboration. “We worked with some of the best Shakespeare scholars … Professor Emma Smith from Oxford was an absolute keystone in the dramaturgy of this work,” says Ellis. Smith said that if Shakespeare were alive today, he would write for games and Ellis agrees: “He was an innovator.”