The Italian project Vajont has been chosen to participate in the 77^th Venice International Film Festival  (2–12 September 2020) in the Venice Virtual Reality section. The VR project, put forward by the team composed of director Iolanda Di Bonaventura and producer Saverio Trapasso, was selected after coming through the various phases of the Biennale College Cinema – VR’s fourth edition (2019 – 2020), and will now be granted access to the Biennale’s support fund for the covering of production costs (which shouldn’t exceed €60,000).

The project previously participated in a final, selection workshop which unfolded in wholly virtual form between 3- 6 March (read our news), alongside two other teams – one from Germany and one from the UK - selected from a further twelve projects, which were themselves chosen off the back of an international and a national call.

According to the synopsis, Vajont is a first-person VR experience set in the Vajont valley, a few hours before disaster strikes (namely, that of the night of 9 October 1963, when an enormous dam burst, flooding nearby villages and resulting in 1,917 deaths, ndr). The story revolves around a conversation between a husband and his wife: the woman senses danger and wants to leave; her husband refutes the idea of any possible danger. What is it that stops us leaving the places where we feel we belong? Can we ever accept the idea of having to protect ourselves from something which is a core part of our identity – the place we grew up in?

Iolanda Di Bonaventura is a visual artist and a director born in L’Aquila in 1993, whose work centres around the role of the environment as a constitutive part of our individual identity, and the deciphering of new technical and creative languages in the arts. Her producer Saverio Trapasso has held numerous positions in multimedia and gaming productions and is currently the CEO and Co-Founder of Artheria, a research and development agency working in the sphere of cross-realities (Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality) as well as in the entertainment, gaming and industrial sectors.