The Venice Film Festival marked its eightieth anniversary with the usual ambitious slate of films—though fewer Hollywood stars appeared this year because of the actors' strike. The festival suffered no real setback. When we talk about the Mostra, after all, we're really talking about multiple events nested inside one: official competitions (the Golden Lion went to Poor Things by Yorgos Lanthimos), restored films, two independent parallel sections packed with events and guests (the Giornate degli Autori and Settimana della Critica), and the Virtual Reality section, Venice Immersive, which unfolds entirely on the small island of Lazzaretto Vecchio—a short walk and boat ride from the Cinema Palace.
The virtual section is less well known, but it offers something distinct: nearly all the experiences are solitary. A headset covers your entire face. Headphones deliver the audio. When the experience begins, you're submerged in 360° footage. The medium opens extraordinary possibilities. There are interactive video games and narrative films in which the viewer is guided passively through the story—like traditional cinema, but with an expanded field of vision. Some works invite you to inhabit the perspective of someone living with an illness you don't have. A few years ago, an award-winning film called Goliath: Playing with Reality let viewers experience schizophrenia. This year's festival included works that did something similar.
The Venice Immersive Award for Achievement went to Empereur, directed by Marion Burger and Ilan Cohen—a work that approaches the impossible: helping viewers feel what aphasia is like. The director's father has been aphasic for years following a stroke. She introduces us first to her own memories of those events through stark black-and-white drawings that aren't photorealistic but profoundly moving. Then the perspective shifts. You step into her father's skin as she teaches him, over and over, to write again, to express himself. The interactivity involves simple exercises—guided by the daughter—that turn out to be agonizingly hard. Even when you think you've done them right, you're told you've failed. You feel it: the exhausting, utterly isolating sensation of thinking clearly while being unable to speak. Lonely. Cut off from the world—doubly so, trapped in the headset. Drawing on scraps of communication from her father over the years, the director has imagined the contents of his mind: memories mixed with mysterious images inspired by the day he began crying the word "emperor" over and over. The film sets out to make poetry—visually and narratively—of a man's mind that can no longer communicate. It succeeds. It's stunning and overwhelming. You don't get the concrete reality of what aphasia is—that's impossible. But you carry away an unforgettable, elegiac sense of how cruelly the condition diminishes a human being.
Sight itself is the subject of Spots of Light, a documentary by Adam Weingrod. It follows an Israeli man who loses his vision in combat, meets and marries a woman he has never seen. Years later, surgery restores his sight. He sees his wife and children for the first time—then, gradually, loses his vision again. That experience of sight arriving and departing is made grueling for the viewer through incomplete images that flicker and vanish. Weingrod employs a technique rarely used in VR work: one lens goes entirely dark. Seeing three-dimensional images through a single eye is deeply uncomfortable, straining, headache-inducing—but it returns to you the sensation of trauma, the exhaustion of relearning sight, only to lose it once more. Narrated by the man himself, the documentary would never have achieved such power in ordinary cinema.
These works vary in length—anywhere from five to sixty minutes, depending on the degree of interactivity. They're distributed primarily through gaming and virtual-content platforms like Steam. A few sites, including the Turin Film Museum, maintain permanent VR stations that cycle through different pieces.
Could these tools, in time, let us step into the lives of people who seem utterly foreign to us—people we struggle to understand? The films of Venice Immersive suggest it's possible.