At the Venice Film Festival, celebrating a different kind of filmmaking

In an undated image provided by Andrea Avezzu’, “Eggscape” by German Heller, the winner of the Venice Immersive Special Jury Prize in 2022. Venice Immersive is the Venice International Film Festival’s section devoted to extended reality (X.R.) filmmaking. (Andrea Avezzu’ via The New York Times)

By A.J. Goldmann

On the small island of Lazzaretto Vecchio, the world’s oldest film festival rehearses its future. Since 2017, the island, once a quarantine station for plague victims, has served as the staging ground for Venice Immersive, the Venice International Film Festival’s section devoted to extended reality (XR) filmmaking. The vaporetto, or ferry, ride to reach it only takes a couple of minutes. But when you disembark, you might as well be light-years away from Lido, the film festival’s main base, with its celebrity, fan and paparazzi-fueled hullabaloo.

On the island, scores of videos, experiences and other projects that use virtual, augmented and mixed reality to create immersive digital worlds come to life in labyrinthine indoor spaces that total more than 50,000 square feet. Elegant and surprisingly intimate, the setting is a far cry from the industry conventions and tech hubs where this sort of work is frequently unveiled.

Roughly half of the selected projects also compete for three official prizes that are awarded during the festival’s closing ceremony, alongside the Golden and Silver Lions. The festival opens Wednesday and runs through Sept. 6.

In his late July announcement of the official selection, Alberto Barbera, the festival’s artistic director, proudly called Venice Immersive, now it its ninth edition, “the reference competition in the world for all those who deal with this form of expression.”

Liz Rosenthal and Michel Reilhac, the curators of Venice Immersive, selected this year’s crop of 69 titles — 30 of which compete for the festival prizes — out of roughly 450 projects.

In 2016, Reilhac curated a trial virtual reality program as part of the Cannes Film Festival’s market. After Cannes decided not to continue the experiment past the initial year, Reilhac persuaded the Venice Film Festival, which is under the umbrella of the Venice Biennale, to let him try something similar there. He and Rosenthal developed a beta version of Venice Immersive called VR Theater later that year.

“Just a few months after Cannes, it was again an amazing success,” Reilhac explained. “On that basis, the Biennale then the following year decided: We’re going to give you the means to really grow and build something significant.”

In 2017, the section began awarding prizes and moved to Lazzaretto Vecchio, where it has remained since, save for two years when the pandemic forced it online. (Cannes started an immersive competition of its own in 2024.)

“We’re seeing the growth of a trend that is bridging the gap between cinema and VR in terms of creative approaches,” Reilhac said of this year’s lineup, in a joint video interview with Rosenthal in early August. “We have a lot of projects that are using the language of cinema and the grammar and triggering emotions by telling the stories they tell.”

Rosenthal added: “Michel and I have always approached it that this is an art form that is not a technological gimmick.”

One of this year’s projects that she highlighted during the interview was “On the Other Earth,” by choreographer Wayne McGregor. The project, billed as “the world’s first post-cinematic choreographic installation,” is Venice Immersive’s initial collaboration with the Dance Biennale, which McGregor curates, and will come to life in the Venice Arsenal, the city’s former shipyard and armory, rather than on Lazzaretto Vecchio.

“It’s using a totally new form, where it’s a giant 360 LED, circular screen with mixed reality headsets,” Rosenthal said. “So you have the feeling you are actually there with a live performance.” She and Reilhac hope to work together with the Biennale’s other sections — art, music, theater and architecture — in future editions.

Taiwanese filmmaker Chen Singing took home one of Venice Immersive’s main prizes in 2022 for “The Man Who Couldn’t Leave,” a 360-degree short film that plunged the viewer into a harrowing historical episode of political repression in postwar Taiwan.

“I’m very grateful that Liz and Michel provide a really great platform for lots of creators and filmmakers and for helping to showcase all these virtual worlds from around the world,” Chen said in a recent video interview.

She was speaking through a translator from her office in Taipei, Taiwan, where she was putting the finishing touches on her virtual reality installation, “The Clouds Are Two Thousand Meters Up,” one of the 30 projects selected to compete in this year’s program.

Chen’s new work also received gap financing from the 2023 Venice Production Bridge, the festival’s film market and another way in which the festival supports audiovisual and immersive productions. Inspired by a story by Taiwanese author Wu Ming-yi, Chen’s new work is a single-user, free-roaming VR experience in which the participant’s interactions are entirely triggered through moving their head and walking.

“VR is a very new medium, and everything is still improving, including the technical part,” Chen said. “Every year, me and my team go to Venice Film Festival and what we look forward to the most is to see how these works are improving from the technical side and the storytelling side.”

Beyond the resources — financial, technological and organizational — that the Venice Film Festival and the Venice Biennale provide, Reilhac said that the unique atmosphere of Lazzaretto Vecchio had been central to the section’s identity and to its success.

“Being on the island helps us so much, because you have to make that effort of taking the boat, even though it takes only two minutes to cross. You’re on the island and it’s small, and everyone is there because the immersive community is still not huge,” he said, adding that a lot of professional and creative connections occurred during the nightly cocktail evenings.

The president of this year’s three-person jury is Eliza McNitt, an American director of immersive films as well as those using more traditional technology. She is also a Venice Immersive veteran. In 2018, “Chorus of the Cosmos,” the first part of her immersive outer-space trilogy, “Spheres,” won the section’s top prize. “Venice is remarkable because it’s the oldest film festival and it’s embracing the newest forms of technology,” she said.