Thomas in Love

Thomas has not left his flat in years. Everything that reaches him comes through a screen: the videophone, his insurer's artificial assistant, a virtual girlfriend, online dating services. When the insurance company puts him into a treatment programme, actual people start arriving in his life, one of them a sex worker sent to his door. Pierre-Paul Renders shoots the entire film from Thomas's own screen. We never see him, only hear his voice and watch the faces of the people he calls. Made in 2000, it is now counted among the first films built entirely out of a screen, and its guesses about where technology was going are unnervingly close.