📆 Saturday, June 8th – Wednesday, June 12th
📍 Grand Illusion Cinema: 1403 NE 50th St, Seattle
No matter how many hours you’ve sunk into the many iterations of The Legend of Zelda, you probably have nothing on Narcissa Wright. If you’re big into the world of videogame speedrunning, you may already know where this is going, and for those new to the concept, welcome, and buckle in.
Wright was a famous speedrunner, most notably in the Zelda world for breaking the record on The Wind Waker, and her Twitch streams would draw in nearly 20,000 followers. But for an art form that has given so many marginalized and outcast people the means to explore identities and communities, the gaming world can turn on their own; when Wright came out as a trans woman, her fanbase collapsed, and she suffered endless online abuse and harassment.
The documentary Break the Game takes over 3,000 hours of Wright’s streaming footage and combines it with 8-bit animated sequences in this story of a rise, a fall, and a possible resurgence as Wright embarks on a Breath of the Wild world record attempt. But more importantly, it’s a narrative about what it means to live in public, how to face your enemies, and how to be true to yourself. Because even if Hyrule and the “real world” seem different, monsters can always be defeated.
If you show up to the Saturday, June 8th screening of the film, stick around afterward to watch a live Ocarina of Time speedrun from dannyb21892 while the film’s director, Jane M. Wagner, conducts a Q&A in the chat.
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