This article is part of the Motherboard Guide to Cinema, a semi-regular column exploring foreign and obscure speculative films.

Humans have been trying to parse illusion from reality for about as long as we've been able to think critically about the world. For Plato, we were like prisoners in a cave, only able to see the shadows of the 'real' world of forms playing on the cave wall. According to certain schools of Buddhism, we project an illusory reality onto a more fundamental phenomenal reality called dharma. A number of Vedic texts reference the concept of maya, an ephemeral illusion that obscures a more fundamental, eternal reality.

These narratives about the divide between surface level illusion and a deeper reality have stayed with us over the millennia, although now the stories are often couched in the language of high technology. Today, simulated realities are in vogue like never before thanks to the Hollywood blockbusters like the Matrix, Blade Runner, and television series like Westworld.

But decades before the idea of a technically simulated reality entered into the mainstream consciousness there was World on a Wire, the spectacular sci-fi odyssey from the German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Released as a two-part television movie in West Germany in 1973, World on a Wire is set in the near future and tells the story of a computer scientist named Fred Stiller who becomes director of the Institute for Cybernetics and Future Science after his predecessor, Professor Vollmer, mysteriously dies.