

"For me, people having skin in the game, having an emotional connection to what they were telling, is more important than a lot of things." "If you're talking about what someone believes, fact-checking is a difficult process," he says. He says he prioritized the vividness and conviction of the story rather than any verifiable, factual event.

Out of around 100 responses, he interviewed 20 people, and only four made it into the final film. Photo by Joseph Cultice The director sourced these "case studies" by posting a Google Form online to solicit stories. "In psychology, I always found the case studies most interesting," says Ascher, who sees the theory primarily as a vehicle for his storytelling. "What I was most interested in were the case studies, talking with people who deeply suspect the world wasn't real, and how and why they came to that." A veteran of the city's alternative culture scene who hung out at spots like the Kitchen Club and Churchill's Pub, the director, whose previous films have explored sleep paralysis ( The Nightmare) and conspiracy theories around Kubrick's The Shining ( Room 237), drew inspiration from his psychology studies at the University of Miami. Screening this weekend at the Bill Cosford Cinema in Coral Gables, A Glitch in the Matrix by Miami-raised, Los Angeles-based documentary filmmaker Rodney Ascher explores the strange idea of simulation theory and, in particular, those that believe it wholeheartedly. However, they probably didn't think that people would take them at their word.

When Lana and Lily Wachowski created their 2000 sci-fi action film The Matrix, they imagined that humanity was trapped in a giant computer simulation, with the majority harvested for electricity by the evil Machines and a small minority fighting to free them. Dick and films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder explored characters living in falsified realities. In fiction, the idea has existed at least since the 1970s, when stories by Philip K. Simulation theory, the idea that we are living in a constructed, digital reality, has become a big deal. Have you ever thought about whether the world is real? What if everything you touch, see, and even everyone you know, is an illusion? Well, you're not alone.
