The future came early to this year’s Venice film festival as the event’s pioneering Venice Immersive (VI) section launched a day before the official opening gala. Based on the small island of Lazzaretto Vecchio, a short boat ride from the main festival site, VI points to a possible new direction for cinema with an eclectic programme of extended reality (XR) artworks. The mix of installations, videos and virtual worlds can look outlandish when compared with the other, more traditional pictures at the festival. But VI’s base at Venice reveals the event’s true parentage and core principles.
“Our mission, in holding this event at one of the biggest film festivals, has always been to build bridges between the cinema industry and the budding immersive community,” says Michel Reilhac, who established VI alongside co-curator Liz Rosenthal back in 2017. “This year, I feel that mission is being manifested.”
As evidence, Reilhac points to the fact that two veteran mainstream directors – The Bourne Identity’s Doug Liman and Conclave’s Edward Berger – have made the jump to XR projects selected for this year’s competition. By the same token, the immersive community have learned from conventional cinematic storytelling and are increasingly incorporating these lessons into their work.
“In the early years a lot of people were mainly experimenting with the tools,” Rosenthal says. “Now we are seeing a new maturity and a seamless evolution in terms of narrative storytelling.”
This year’s VI selection showcases 69 projects from 27 countries, whittled down from an initial submission of about 450. These range in length from Menghui Huang’s seven-minute VR animation The Big Cube, through to Olov Redmalm and Klaus Lyngeled’s interactive fantasy The Midnight Walk, which has a running time of six hours. Potential highlights include Craig Quintero and Phoebe Greenberg’s Blur, a theatrical exploration of AI cloning, Wayne McGregor’s mixed reality dance production On the Other Earth, and Singing Chen’s The Clouds are Two Thousand Meters Up, a VR epic adapted from a short story from Taiwanese author Wu Ming-Yi. “The Clouds are Two Thousand Meters Up is spectacular,” Rosenthal says. “That’s the closest I’ve seen to an immersive piece that’s stepping into cinema, but on its own terms.”
VI’s various subgenres – immersive film, mixed reality, installations – provide handy signposts for newcomers to navigate this unfamiliar terrain. But they may also be a series of category errors that run counter to the spirit of immersive art. “VR borrows from the language and elements of cinema,” Reilhac says. “So it’s both an evolution of cinema and its own artform. I don’t know if it’s relevant to label and pigeonhole them any more. What we are seeing this year is a complete hybridisation.”
According to Rosenthal, the clue is in the name. “Immersive art involves the melding and blending of all the forms, whether it’s live performance or virtual, games design or cinema,” she says. “It’s not a matter of choosing one form or the other.”
