tHis Cannes Film Festival usually has nothing to do with video games, but this year it is the host working with exceptions. Lili is a co-production between the New York-based Game Studio Ink Story (creator of the 1979 Revolution: Black Friday, a photojournalist about Iran) and Royal Shakespeare, and it turned to modern Iran with Macbeth’s compelling translocation.
“It was an incredible coup to have the first video game experience at the Cannes Film Festival,” said Vassiliki Khonsari, co-founder of Ink Story. “People say I’m not familiar with the game, so I can try it for five minutes. […] But once they enter, people in the film industry feel this growing sense of empowerment. ”
The immersive competition at the Cannes Film Festival began in 2024, although the lineup usually does not include traditional video games. “VR movies and projection mapping are what it does,” said Navid Khonsari, husband of Vassiliki, the other co-founder of Ink Story. “But Lili weaves live-action videos with video game mechanics in a similar way, such as telling lies or immortality. Its leader Zar Amir Ebrahimi won the Cannes actress three years ago.
Lili focuses on the story of Lady Macbeth, the ambitious wife of BASIJ (a paramilitary volunteer militia within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran). Just like in the play, she draws the murders to ensure her husband’s rise. “I think Lady Macbeth’s narrative is her manipulativeness, and that’s what interests us.”
“Social limitations based on her gender forced her to try to play any leadership role she could,” he continued. “If she were a man, she would be one of the greatest kings the country has ever experienced, but because she was a woman, she had to work in the structure that served her. And I think it’s the same as our role as Lili: because of society, she, she is limited to her ability to rise high.”
The player is a member of Hecate Web, a group of hackers representing Macbeth’s witches, who first access Lili’s phone and computer and watch her watch her on the CCTV camera at home. Surveillance and censorship oppression is a key theme. Lili tried to access YouTube makeup tutorials at some point but was blocked only by the state’s firewall. The fact that the player plays an uncomfortable voyeur character is intentional. “When it comes to each other, monitoring each other, we are all part of the problem,” Navid said.
You can bypass it to allow her to enter, but, prompting a memorable scene where she wraps her head around before applying eyeliner and lipstick. “That was her ritual, putting on makeup in a world she couldn’t do [in]without her husband knows or anyone else knows it,” Vassiliki said, “We love it as this kind of fable because she is suffocating in the world and in various masks she has to wear, and she has to wear herself… Our Lady Lily, our Lady Lily, we are all awakened and the tools we use to help her help her to help her, thus helping her get into trouble.
Lili is scheduled to be released in late 2026, and RSC’s Sarah Ellis said it is likely to turn into a drama sometime in the future. Navid said there are already plans for some movie versions shot with the same lens as the game – a reminder that there are increasing lines between the worlds of games, movies and drama. This is unlikely to be the last time RSC will be involved in the game.
“I’ve always been interested in the fusion of games, especially games and drama,” Ellis said, who initially turned to Ink with the idea of this collaboration. “We have worked with some of the best Shakespeare scholars… Professor Emma Smith of Oxford is definitely the dramatic cornerstone of the work,” Ellis said. Smith once said that if Shakespeare was alive today, he would write for the game, and Ellis agreed: “He is an innovator.”
