The Immersive Film Competition presents nine films reflecting diverse human rights issues. Immersive films bring specific knowledge to the audience, often based on the sharing of direct experience. Additionally, in immersive films we enter mental states that transcend everyday life – or are such that we’ve not remembered them.
In Perinatal Dreaming: Understanding Country we find ourselves in the mind of an unborn child, and we experience birth and the subsequent connection to the outside world, all in a spiritual vision that reminds us of the possibilities of a shared consciousness. The film Address Unknown: Fukushima Now also returns to the collective past, reconstructing memories of a home destroyed by nuclear tragedy.
Another film working with recollection, although of a confused nature, is Emperor, which evokes a journey through the mind of a man with a neurological disorder. His daughter struggles to understand her father’s seemingly nonsensical babbling and the film pieces together a mosaic of lost memories and conflicting emotions. The excruciating loss of home is the subject of the stunning RAPTURE II – Portal, in which we find ourselves in a horror-filled loop of constantly passing through a dilapidated apartment that the narrator was forced to abandon as a result of the Russian occupation of Ukraine’s Donbass region.
The search for a fixed place in the world is also addressed in the poetic Murmuration, which uses a fairy-tale framework of an encounter with an underwater creature to bring a poignant insight into the experience of migrants crossing the sea with the vision of a better life in Europe.
The idea that it is possible to change an entire system through the sharing of experiences is conveyed in All I Know About Teacher Li, which tells the story of the activist initiative of a Chinese emigrant who helped to spark democratic protests in China through his online activities.
