Reflective Encounters

“So much of modern life is spent immersed in technology that human beings can be reduced to cogs in a machine. Such is the thesis of Virtual Voice, a montage essay film by Sudanese-Russian filmmaker Suzannah Mirghani, whose previous works include Al-Sit, Grand Prix winner at the Tampere Film Festival. The film uses a Bratz-like doll as its heroine, a figure described as an “ego-warrior” who moves to the beating pulse of her phone’s algorithms. Questions of humanity are plugged into Google with Siri-narrated results, the virtual assistants giving life advice and controlling our movements before eventually rising above us in a terrifying fashion previously confined to science-fiction.

The film makes light-hearted farce of Suzi’s good intentions – typing women’s liberty into an app store turns out fitness programmes whilst excerpts from Dylan Thomas and Maya Angelou are copied and pasted into social media posts without context. It’s a hyper-actualisation of mass production, the aura of everything fading into pure, blinding superficiality. Virtual Voice is a striking reflection on the contemporary digital landscape from Mirghani, made largely using screen captures, which ties directly into a critique of the contemporary mode of post-feminism.”

— Lillian Crawford