Venice 82: How Virtual Reality Cinema Tells Disability Stories With Empathy

Coverage of the Venice Film Festival tends to fixate on the familiar spectacles: red-carpet fashion, political controversy, the year's prestige films. When Ombre e Luci attends, we don't ignore all that—it's woven into the fabric of the event—but we commit ourselves to searching out work that matters artistically, morally, and aesthetically. As a first selection (you can find our second roundup here), during the opening days of the 82nd edition, we turn to the festival's virtual reality program. These films demand a headset—sometimes awkward to wear—but many will find their way beyond the festival circuit to production platforms and dedicated VR websites.

Mirage

Directors Naima Karim and Aleena Hanif create a short that draws us into the interior landscape of a girl suffering from depression. The film reconstructs her distorted perception: we watch her attempt a climb, then plummet into emptiness. But the words she speaks to herself—the insults, the self-contempt—are all too real. The viewer wears a vibrating vest that intensifies the connection. You can try to intervene, though the gestures aren't always clear—until suddenly the film asks for something simple and profound: an embrace. Virtual reality here amplifies empathy toward an invisible suffering whose signs are too often overlooked.

If You See a Cat

Through a cat's eyes, we observe a lonely, unhappy Japanese boy. The cat is his only comfort—but only he can see it. We are, then, a ghost, powerless to help when his mother, worried that he's seeing things that don't exist, decides to admit him to a hospital. Despite animator Wada Atsushi's soft, colorful drawings, the experience disturbs. We watch forced treatments imposed without any attempt to understand the patient's real struggles, as if restraints and medication were solutions rather than humiliations. The film points to how mental illness is treated in Japan, but it is a universal indictment of broken psychiatric care.

Eddie and I

A brief introduction teaches us words in sign language. You'll need them to interact with the protagonist, who is deaf. We enter his restless night of nightmares before a camping trip he dreads. The film casts us as a large, powerful creature—an imaginary being tasked with helping him overcome his fears while learning to communicate with him properly. We're invited to encourage him, to observe, to try; we're promised help and friendship. Once you grasp the necessary gestures—the system is intuitive, asking only that you mirror the movements shown before you—you feel the joy of actually communicating in a language you don't know. Through practice, Maya Shekel's short teaches us that sign language holds equal dignity with any other. The experience is both technical and profoundly human.

A Long Goodbye

How do you hold time still when someone you love faces a disease that erases memory relentlessly? In this immersive work by Belgian directors Kate Voet and Victor Maes, someone records a woman's voice. Gradually, we come to know her: we learn fragments of her family life, her work, but we also sense her struggle to express her thoughts clearly. It is a sad and beautiful experience. We reconstruct a life that will soon fade almost entirely from her mind, yet remain in the minds of those around her—and in ours, for these few minutes. The weight of grief is lifted by the lightness of a butterfly that carries us from room to room, each linked to a different object or moment from the past. The film's most brilliant idea: we know her precisely through the memories she is losing, so they are not lost. Memory becomes a bridge between dissolution and permanence.

D-Day: The Camera Soldier

The daughter of Sergeant Richard Taylor travels to Normandy for the first time to see where her father, assigned to film the invasion, landed during World War II. She brings us with her, making us feel we're truly there. More than that: director Chloé Rochereuil lets us step into the photographs and footage her father captured, rendered three-dimensional through the film's technical artistry. Moved, she reflects on why her father's work mattered: to show the horror of war so it would never happen again. Words we still need to repeat today, more than ever.