‘Shakespeare would be writing for games today’: Cannes’ first video game Lili is a retelling of Macbeth

Translocating the Scottish play to Iran with help from the RSC, iNK Stories' version focuses on a Lady Macbeth contending with an oppressive surveillance state

The Cannes film festival isn't typically associated with video games, but this year it's playing host to an unusual collaboration. Lili is a co-production between the New York-based game studio iNK Stories (creator of 1979 Revolution: Black Friday, about a photojournalist in Iran) and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and it's been turning heads with its eye-catching translocation of Macbeth to modern-day Iran.

It's been such an incredible coup to have it as the first video game experience at Cannes," says iNK Stories co-founder Vassiliki Khonsari. People have gone in saying, I'm not familiar playing games, so I may just try it out for five minutes. [...] But then once they're in, there is this growing sense of empowerment that people from the film world are feeling."