Screw It, I'll Play Make Believe

Caught between two worlds, one real and one imagined, three filmmakers have travelled 4000-miles across Europe to understand Live Action Role-Play (LARP), the hobby where these worlds collide. In its essence, LARP is an extension of how you experienced games as a child. When tabletop games grew too big for the board, players put down their dice, picked up their swords, and have been playing make-believe ever since. The culmination of years-old conversations in a local pub, Treasure Trapped is part-documentary, part-road movie; a film that charts the journey of Mike, Al and Nick, as they explore this often misunderstood pastime. Casting a unique look over a worldwide community that is known for its eccentricities, this project aspires to bring the hobby to the masses. Game on!

Darkon is an award-winning feature-length documentary film that follows the real-life adventures of the Darkon Wargaming Club in Baltimore, Maryland, a group of fantasy live-action role-playing (LARP) gamers.

Meet Jon Gallagher, a LARPer with Asperger's syndrome, and see how LARPing helps him make friends, learn social skills, get a job, and in many ways, saves his life.

A documentary about three people with an extraordinary hobby: live Game (LARP). A weekend to be someone else, experience adventure, fight battles, be a child again; recovery from reality and yourself.

Welcome to Monster Camp, the true story about a world where people transform into creatures, heroes, and monsters to escape their daily lives. In the vein of Lord of the Rings, World of Warcraft, and Dungeons and Dragons; these enthusiasts have developed a complicated world to bring their fantasies to life. Romantic relationships are forged between characters. Friendships are destroyed over plot disputes. Characters are slain and never return. But keeping this world alive takes a lot of real world work. And unless someone is willing to take charge, the fantasy may be lost forever.

Every year during summer one of the biggest battles of mankind takes place amidst the hillsides of middle earth. Knights, elves and magicians are fighting orcs and the dark powers. What looks like a scene from Lord of the Rings actually takes place in a field in Germany, where thousands of role players meet to plunge into a fantasy world of their own. More than 250.000 people in Germany regularly make this transition. The documentary accompanies five role players in their daily lives and their parallel ones. Where does their yearning for a shared world of fantasy come from? What does this reveal about our hectic, technological life? Sunday warriors is a film about the passion for playing and the ambition to exceed your limits.

The Dungeon Masters explores the subculture of role-playing games, specifically Dungeons & Dragons, which for over 30 years has offered gamers the chance to escape their mundane lives and participate in a world they might otherwise never experience. Popularity and power are based on creativity and imagination rather than social status or wealth, and success is based not on who you know but on what you do.

Haunted by childhood traumas, Veera is trying to become more independent through live-action role-playing. As she guides herself and her mentally challenged brother through worlds of multiple roles and identities, witches and wizards, she finds the courage to face the demons of her own past and her abusive father’s legacy.

Über Goober focuses on the often-misunderstood, sometimes-controversial, and always-kind-of-geeky world of Gamers. Director Steve Metze examines several different groups including historical miniature gamers, role-players, and those known simply as "LARPers." The film also explores opposition from religious groups, negative media portrayals, and some of the meanest 'man-on-the-street' interviews ever committed to video. Meet the Gamers, learn their exotic language, see their bizarre rituals, gasp at their semi-authentic costumes, and thrill to the painting techniques on their miniatures!

An in-depth look into how the World of Darkness and Vampire: The Masquerade created a phenomenon in the 1990s – a zeitgeist that helped shape film, literature, fashion, club culture, and ultimately fans, whose lives it forever altered.

A coming of age saga about a 14-year old boy whose life alternates between the medieval fantasy kingdom of Adria and the real world trials of a challenging adolescence.

Two salesmen trash a company truck on an energy drink-fueled bender. Upon their arrest, the court gives them a choice: do hard time or spend 150 service hours with a mentorship program. After one day with the kids, however, jail doesn't look half bad.

Bound together by a desire to play "Mazes and Monsters," Robbie and his four college classmates decide to move the board game into the local cavern. Robbie loses his mind, and the line between reality and fantasy fuse into a harrowing nightmare.

A MODERN MEDIEVAL SAGA, The Wild Hunt tells the story of Erik Magnusson, a young man who decides to follow his estranged girlfriend Evelyn into a medieval re-enactment game when he discovers that she has been seduced by one of the players. As the down-to-earth Erik treks deeper into the game in search of his love, he inadvertently disrupts the delicate balance of the make believe fantasy-land. Passions are unleashed. Rules are broken. Reality and fantasy collide. The good-hearted game turns into a tragedy of mythic proportion... Capturing the culture of costume play and the potentially dangerous intersection of real and made-up worlds, The Wild Hunt is a timely and potent comment on the consuming nature of adopting another identity, even within a game, and the modern yearning for ritual.

Three best friends and dedicated roleplayers take to the woods to reenact a dungeons and dragons-like scenario as a live action role-playing game. Trouble arises when a prop spellbook purchased from the internet ends up being a genuine grimoire and they unwittingly conjure up a blood-lusting succubus from hell.

Follows two years in the life of Greg Sommer, aka Skull Man, as he builds the Canadian chapter of Box Wars, an international underground movement of cardboard-based combat.

"Free Spaces" sketches a new and transformative image of four major cities in Eastern Europe. In te post-communist urban settings of Tbilisi (Georgia), Yerevan (Armenia), Chișinău (Moldova) and Kiev (Ukraine), Ina Ivanceanu follows artists and activists as they reclaim public spaces and assert their freedom of expression. Occupying a cinema, reviving an old Soviet circus, converting a grim metro passage into a glamorous arena, and repurposing a defunct factory building into a cultural agora. By seizing and creatively transforming public spaces characterized by an abondoned past, today's new generation explores democratic means and freedom while also confronting pervasive neoliberal structures in their respective societies.

Documentary exploring the life of the late, famous Portuguese musician, António Variações.

Considering sound over language, Colleen Pesci’s Cat Secrets explores the purr of a cat, its frequency and hum, as a method of healing. Cat Secrets’ narrator spends much time in the bath, exploring what a body should do to heal, a practical sensibility with an intimate home movie feel.

Power Grab by Nicola Singh and Helen Collard focuses on the interplay of bodies in opposition and harmony.