This year's Venice Film Festival has seen its pioneering immersive section, Venice Immersive (VI), launch a day before the official opening gala, signalling a new maturity in extended reality (XR) filmmaking. Based on the island of Lazzaretto Vecchio, VI presents a diverse programme of XR artworks, including installations, videos and virtual worlds, pointing to a possible new direction for cinema.
Michel Reilhac, who co-founded VI with Liz Rosenthal in 2017, said the mission has always been to build bridges between the cinema industry and the immersive community. 'This year, I feel that mission is being manifested,' he noted, pointing to veteran mainstream directors Doug Liman and Edward Berger, who have made the jump to XR projects selected for this year's competition.
Rosenthal observed a 'seamless evolution' in narrative storytelling within the immersive sector. 'In the early years a lot of people were mainly experimenting with the tools. Now we are seeing a new maturity,' she said. This year's VI selection features 69 projects from 27 countries, ranging from a seven-minute VR animation to a six-hour interactive fantasy.
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. Rosenthal described the latter as 'the closest I've seen to an immersive piece that's stepping into cinema, but on its own terms.'
Reilhac emphasised that VR is both an evolution of cinema and its own artform, adding, 'What we are seeing this year is a complete hybridisation.' Rosenthal agreed, noting that immersive art involves melding all forms, whether live performance, virtual, games design or cinema. 'It's not a matter of choosing one form or the other,' she said.
