Austin Sley Julian

Almost forty years after its first appearance in You The Better, the house returns as a character in Beckman’s new work Reach Capacity, now symbolising real estate. The economic and political elements and the structure of the film are closely associated with the most famous of all board games dealing with real estate, Monopoly. Its origins go back to the early 1900s, when Elizabeth Magie created a first version of what she called The Landlord’s Game. Magie’s game had two sets of rules, a Prosperity set and a Monopolist set (only the latter was kept by Parker Brothers when they further developed the game without her). Magie’s aim was to illustrate how society as a whole thrives when monopolies are banished and income is distributed equally. Beckman takes over Magie’s dual game structure by having her screen flip over when a monopoly is reached.

Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer’s first feature as co-directors, Empty Metal takes place in a world similar to ours—one of mass surveillance, pervasive policing, and increasing individual apathy. The lives of several people, each inhabiting extreme poles of American social and political consciousness, weave together as each attempts to achieve some kind of forward motion, sometimes in contradiction, and always under the eye of far more controlling powers.