Season 1

World on a Wire (Welt am Draht, 1973), Season 1 — two episodes to watch online on iFILM, a sci-fi noir by Fassbinder.

Fred Stiller takes over the Cybernetics Institute's Simulacron project after his director dies suddenly. Simulacron runs a fully populated virtual society — thousands of identities who don't know they are data. When Stiller's colleague Lause vanishes in front of witnesses and every trace of him disappears, the engineer starts asking questions. Part Two turns those questions around: if Simulacron holds one layer of reality, what guarantees the layer above it is real?

Fassbinder made this for West German television in 1973, 26 years before The Matrix. It's slow, deliberate, and still startling — closer to Kafka than to action sci-fi. Stream World on a Wire Season 1 online on iFILM.