Kim Cannon Arm is an unassuming and unlikely hero. From a distance, he still looks like a teenager although, in fact, he is well into middle age (and may even be 56). Kim’s domain is the Shed and the Bip Bip Bar where he can indulge his favourite 80s shoot ‘em up arcade game, Gyruss. He is a true virtuoso, a Zen master, at the game. Young Danish director Mads Hedegaard’s debut feature documentary Cannon Arm And The Arcade Quest shows him, with the support of his friends, trying to break a world record by playing Gyruss for 100 hours non-stop.
The film, produced by Good Company Pictures with support from New Danish Screen, is screening in the Nordic Panorama this week before showing at the London Film Festival next month. It has already won plaudits at other festivals, from CPH:DOX to Hot Docs.
Hedegaard takes a break from his latest assignment – painting the exterior of his mum’s house – to explain to Business Doc Europe just what led him into the subculture of arcade games.
An old friend from film school had invited him down to the arcade to check it out. “When I walked through the door, I was just blown away by the sounds and the lights and the colours,” Hedegaard, who graduated from the National Film School of Denmark in 2017, remembers. “I was just blown away instantly and then I met some of the guys.”
When Kim mentioned he was contemplating trying to break the world record for playing Gyruss, Heegaard immediately thought this could be a strong subject for a film.
“It was very simple. A man has a goal. Will he succeed in achieving that goal or not,” the director explains how he initially saw the film’s trajectory. However, the documentary is as much about the friendship between the arcade game players as it is about Kim’s genius for Gyruss. They all met each other years ago. The outside world may view them as oddball eccentrics but they’re a very tight knit group.
“They’ve all had this love for the game since they were young. Kim has been playing for 40 years…”
The Arcade provides a safe harbour for them. It takes them back to their youth. “Most of all, it is friendship that makes them come there,” the director suggests. “It’s [about] meeting people who relate to their interests and their passions…not very many people have that passion.”
Arcade games were hugely popular in the 80s. Since then, their popularity has waned. However, Heegaard believes that players are coming back to them. A younger generation is drawn by curiosity while older players are motivated by nostalgia.
Yes, Hedegaard enjoys playing himself although he is no expert. His favourite game is Galaga in which a lone starfighter at the bottom of the screen needs to repel the Galaga forces and thereby save all of humankind. “It is kind of similar to Gyruss. You are a spaceship shooting down aliens and stuff like that.”
It would have been easy for the documentary to poke fun at the gamers or to portray them as antisocial oddballs. Hedegaard was determined to avoid this. “They look a bit strange and they are a bit strange sometimes. I always said the easiest thing in the world would be to make a caricature out of them. It would be the most easiest thing in the world to make a film which makes them stand out like weirdos. But it was very, very important for me that the audience get an impression they are real people – people like everyone else with their quirks and problems but also with their passions, friendship and sense of community.”
Kim and his friends are immensely loyal to one another. In making the documentary, Hedegaard became part of their group. They welcomed the director into their world. He, in turn, was very honest with them. That made him all the more protective of his subjects.
Spending 100 consecutive hours playing Gyruss is no gimmick. It takes a huge amount of will power, energy and skill. The health risks are obvious.
“The game is so intense. It is a huge undertaking,” the director agrees. “It does require quite a bit of preparation and training. Also, [there is] the awareness it could potentially be dangerous. It’s a massive thing that he [Kim] attempted to do.”
“It was only luck,” he says of one of the most poignant scenes late on in the documentary when Kim goes out on the veranda with a close friend and they start discussing the record attempt. Kim makes it clear what matters most is his friendships, not how many aliens he managed to shoot over a period of four days without any proper sleep.
Now, Hedegaard is taking the leap into fiction. His next project is a revenge thriller set in the stone age. Opus Films in Poland is the co-producer. It’s about a young girl and her family of farmers migrating across Europe and meeting a tribe of hunter gatherers. The working title is A Stranger.
Meanwhile, Cannon Arm And The Arcade Quest is being sold by Cargo Films. The film has already shown on Swedish TV and will be broadcast on DR and TV2 in Denmark in November. It may not have had a proper theatrical release in Denmark but Hedegaard has screened it in a cinema to Kim and all his friends.
“That was one of the best days of my life. I was so nervous to show it to them but they were just ecstatic. When they were seeing it, they were shouting and screaming and clapping the whole way through. Afterwards, they were just so happy and so pleased with it…that has been the best thing for me, their reaction to it!”
