11/03/2022 - For the fifth consecutive year, the emblematic Neumünster cultural centre is showcasing the crème de la crème of virtual reality

Proudly carried by the Film Fund Luxembourg and managed by the Montreal-based Centre Phi (under the leadership of Myriam Achard), the initiative is offering viewers of the 12th Luxembourg City Film Festival free access to a unique, immersive journey. The 360° works on the agenda hail from all corners of the globe, with several of them having also been made in the Grand Duchy or in co-production with the country.

In 2022, experiences are turning out to be relatively long, exceeding the twenty-minute mark. This was the case for the work directed by French-Spanish choreographer Bianca Li, Le Bal de Paris (Film Adict, Luxembourg), for example, which homes in on a ball organised by a young woman’s father. Barry Gene Murphy’s Goliath: Playing With Reality (Anagram International/Floréal Films, UK/France), which was revealed in 2021 during the Venice Biennale (within the reputed Venice VR Expanded section, where it walked away with the Jury Grand Prize), more than meets the challenge of portraying the so-called schizophrenia of a man who has been locked up for years in psychiatric institutions and whose only social contact comes from multi-player online games. It sees us following Goliath’s doubts and prevarications, plunging us inside the character’s mental universe. Narrated by Tilda Swinton, the story looks to be breath-taking and explosive.

Another unmissable work is David Adler’s exceptional End of Night (Makropol/Novelab, Denmark/France), which bagged Best VR Story in Venice 2021. Seated in a boat, viewers are guided by Josef (admirably played by Jens Jørn Spottag) who is crossing the North Sea from Denmark in order to reach Nazi-occupied Sweden. Memories and faces collide as the story slowly unfolds. This is a grey and obscure work whose photographic aesthetics (characters linked to memories take the form of fragile printed photo clichés) are nothing short of fascinating.

Favourite films not to be missed include Reeducated by Sam Wolson (The New Yorker/Dirt Empire, USA), which won the VRHAM! Award at the Hamburg Festival in 2021 and which plunges us into the hell of a rehabilitation centre for Muslims hailing from Kazakhstan, located in China’s Xinjiang. Drawing on hours of testimonials and hand-drawn animation, the film reconstructs the inmates’ infernal daily lives. A shocking film. On the Canadian side of things, there’s The Book of Distance by Randall Okita, a work produced by the NFB, which is a sensitive and lyrical exploration into the author’s family past, his grandfather having left Japan in 1930 to start a new life in the Canadian prairies.

A VR cinema set up in the cloister is set to round off the experience (chiefly screening Odyssey 1.4.9, French director François Vautier’s tribute to 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick). The traditional VR day, meanwhile (which opened the event), united no fewer than 30 professionals for discussions revolving around sector-related issues, spanning the fields of virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR). Last but not least, at the end of the festival, an international jury is set to award a prize of 4,000 euros to the best work, composed of Poland’s Ana Brzezinska (curator of the Tribeca Festival’s Immersive Tribeca sidebar), Quebec’s Monique Simard (Chairwoman of the Board for Montreal’s Quartier des Spectacles district, as well as for the Quebecor Fund) and Mexico’s Tupac Martir (artist and founder of Satore Studio).

(Translated from French)