While Katrina Lat is on the ground for us at the Venice Film Festival’s now legendary Immersive showcase we’re still feeling some mighty levels of FOMO.

At least for the pieces on this list we haven’t had the pleasure to catch in secret yet.

What follows are a baker’s dozen picks from the In Competition section for what we’re most looking forward to experiencing — for the first or in some cases second time — both at the festival (in the case of Kat) and beyond (the rest of us, especially Noah).

ANOKHYA: THE ORIGIN

Director: Anand Kishore
Country: India
Running Time: 27 Minutes

This immersive cinema short produced by Oscar-winning composer and ARR Immersive app founder A.R. Rahman makes its global debut at the festival. Rahman has been producing immersive cinema work for some time now, having launched the app this July on Apple Vision Pro with an eye towards bringing it to Meta Quest in the near future.

Which is good news for those of us who like to see immersive cinema works find their audiences, and this piece from writer/director Anand Kishore intrigues:

Anokhya, a courtesan trained in the ancient sixty four arts, seeks a forbidden mystical discipline from a reclusive sage. Burdened by hidden pasts, their encounter reshapes their destinies. Set in a mythic world inspired by Indian epics, the piece places the viewer in intimate proximity to Anokhya as she moves through a sensorial Himalayan landscape toward her first fateful meeting with the sage.

BOWIE: UNSEEN | UNHEARD

Director: Denis O’Regan, Nick Ryan, Joe Crossley
Country: United Kingdom
Running Time: 25 minute

Hello, it’s BOWIE.

It’s also L-Acoustics, which is to immersive sound what THX was in the 1980s and then some. I’ve been inside spaces — from one side of the galaxy to another — that have used L-Acoustics’ kit to completely transport the audience into other worlds.

Legendary music photographer Denis O’Regan uses “more than 800 iconic, rare and previously unseen images spanning two decades of David Bowie’s extraordinary career” paired with a paralleled soundscape narrative that leverages the L-ISA to draw audiences into Bowie’s world.

KAT I AM SO JEALOUS OF YOU RIGHT NOW.

As per the creative team: “Our ambition as L-Acoustics was not simply to present Denis O’Regan’s extraordinary archive, but to create a new way of experiencing it where immersive sound allows audiences to step inside each moment and feel its emotional resonance and connection.”

EMPIRE AT SEA

Director: Peter Flaherty
Country: USA
Running Time: 22 minutes

Long in the works, this tense science fiction drama was originally shot on the legendary volume that Intel set up during the gold rush era of XR, and now the display tech has caught up with director Peter Flaherty’s vision which places the audience on the outside looking in at a converted oil rig which just might be the last hope for a humanity devastated by climate disasters.

The small city in a bottle is threatened by the sighting of a ship headed straight for them, their intentions unclear, leading to tensions amidst the multi-generational crew.

Realized via mixed reality mode on Apple Vision Pro combined with a gorgeous table installation that provides both backdrop and frame for the action, the work spools out like a hybrid of immersive theatre and film. 

EVEREST: THE FIRST ASCENT

Director: Jean Dellac, Benjamin Auriche
Country: France
Running Time: 37 minutes

Before summiting Everest was a bucket list item for techbros and indie wrestlers it was an impossible dream — as far as recorded history goes — until Sherpa Tenzing Norgay and New Zealander Edmund Hillary reached the top as part of a British exposition. This piece takes us back to that first historic expedition.

1953: A British expedition sets out to conquer Everest, a legendary summit that no one has ever reached. Today, you are part of the team. Tenzing Norgay, leader of the Sherpas, guides you through an adventure that will make History. Journey with him through a hidden Nepal of temples and ancient traditions, before facing the cold, the lack of oxygen and glaciers swept by violent storms. The mountain sets the rules: every day brings new surprises and dangers. Who will reach the summit? Who will make it back? Experience from within one of the greatest expeditions of the 20th century.

FINDING FRIDA

Director: Hilde K. Kjøs
Country: Norway
Running Time: 41 minutes

A VR exploration of the world of once internationally acclaimed and now largely forgotten textile artist Frida Hansen. This one intrigues because of the potential to create something visually unique by using virtual recreations of the very materials that the artist did in her work to tell her story.

Artist Statement:

Finding Frida is a documentary VR experience where past and present intertwine in an exploration of art, family and the power of human creativity. Photorealistic 3D scans, dreamlike projections and animated artwork blend with a soundscape of reworked foley and an original musical score. Voice-over drawn from interviews with Frida Hansen and contemporary historical sources seeks authenticity within a dreamlike world while shedding new light on a forgotten female artist. Central to the work is the value of role models, and how VR allows resonance to travel back and forth through time.

GALAPAGOS: THE LAST EDEN

Director: Anthony Geffen
Country: United Kingdom
Running Time: 25 minutes

Margot Robbie narrates this journey through “one of the world’s most iconic ecosystems.”

Artist statement I have captured the Galápagos in 16K 3D resolution, allowing viewers to step into this pristine world, having a personalised experience by interacting with its creatures, and even talk to Charles Darwin himself. It’s especially meaningful to have Margot Robbie, who fell in love with the Galápagos at a young age, guide us on this journey.

NEVATARS

Director: Andy Serkis, Josh Nelson Youssef
Country: USA
Running Time: 31 minutes

A star-studded cast including Josh Gad, Daisy Ridley, and Kathleen Turner, joins this mixed reality experience led by motion capture pioneer Andy Serkis and co-creator Josh Nelson Youssef.

OCTOPOCALYPSE

Director: Max Sacker, Arite Szadkowski
Country: Germany
Running Time: 20 Minutes

This “interactive music video” has a WILD high concept:

What would you do if you met an alien intelligence with power to shape humanity’s future? Three participants enter an interrogation room after a meteor storm has almost destroyed civilization. Before them is an alien octopus: fragile, prophetic, curious, and possibly able to help humanity rebuild. Its attempts at contact arrive through music, touch, rhythm and visions that can be progressive, terrifying or intimate.

They had me with “alien octopus.” Mostly because I think octopi are probably aliens anyway. Very smart. Very weird.

OUT OF THE ASHES

Directors: Rory Mitchell, Nonny de la Peña
Country: USA
Running Time: 26 minutes

A moving look at the aftermath of the 2025 Los Angeles fires and what can be done to prepare for the future of climate change fueled wildfire disasters, we had the privilege of catching three of the seven Out of the Ashes shorts in an early state.

By capturing those who survived the fires with volumetric tech and recreating what they lost in VR directors Rory Mitchell and Nonny de la Peña deliver a powerful jolt that brings home just how fragile the built environment human civilization really is, the toll that takes, and how resilient humanity is collectively at its core. Vital stuff.

SHIFTING CONNECTIONS

Director: Tungyen Chou
Country: Taipei
Running time: 12 minutes

Is it an immersive festival without a VR powered social experience that abstracts physical experience into something digital and hopefully etherial? No, no it isn’t.

The handy dandy synposis:

Shifting Connections is a collective immersive experience that invites participants to step through a threshold into a shared virtual world. Bodies appear as glowing points and connecting lines, forming living constellations shaped by movement and proximity.
Rather than following a story or completing tasks, the work offers an intuitive encounter for audiences of different ages and levels of VR experience. Participants can sense, play with, and transform the relations unfolding around them. As connections form, loosen, and reconfigure, invisible distances become visible, allowing the boundaries between bodies, physical space, and the virtual world to gently dissolve.

TOMORI

Director: Misa Haru
Country: Japan
Running Time: 20 minutes

A VR experience driven in part by the creator’s interest in subverting the lack of tactile feedback in VR to a creative asset leading them to “weaponize” the “anxiety of having one’s vision confined, the disorientation of vertigo, and even the physical fatigue brought on by movement” as mediums for storytelling.

Now we’re talking.

Shizuku, a young worker, undergoes a unique hypnosis by therapist Ayano. The audience enters this trance alongside her, revisiting a teenage family life and Tomori’s past. To adults, adolescent struggles seem trivial, yet they leave lifelong scars. To unveil the truths society ignores, we must look through the eyes of our younger selves. A surreal journey into the depths of memory.

SPOMYNY

Director: Sophia Bulgakova
Country: The Netherlands, Ukraine
Running Time: 20 Minutes

Venice Immersive has never shied away from installation work, but it feels like this year is offering up some especially intriguing (there’s that word again!) and poignant examples of the form. The overall effect creates a sense of urgency around manifesting ideas as spatial constructs to interact with.

Спомини [spomyny] is a Ukrainian word for “memories” or even “memoirs”.
The work derives from personal and communal accounts of the recent years of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in the form of sonic artefacts collected by Bulgakova, which presents itself through the installation created out of metres and metres of insulation pipes.
Discovering one channel at a time and layering the sounds through the pipes, the audience is invited to unveil a non-linear narrative assembled out of intimate encounters of the artist and her struggles in between being abroad and returning home in the past years, collected testimonies and conversations with friends, family and strangers in Ukraine, found footage recordings through social media and news channel which capture glimpses of extreme experiences within everyday reality.
Spomyny, originated from an earlier work by Bulgakova called Sonic Sprawl, using the same physical material, delves deeper into the theme of personalised storytelling and references the source of the insulation tubing, which was found in 2018 at a shipyard in Amsterdam where a lot of men from a Ukrainian community were working at the time.

ULRICA

Director: Hongbo Cai
Country: USA, Mexico, Micronesia
Run Time: 20 Minutes

An intriguing video installation that suspends projections within water "zorbs" with a soundtrack performed live.

A wartime submariner escapes his sinking vessel and descends into ocean’s depths, pursued by a low-frequency pulse he associates with the rumoured enemy craft known as Ulrica. As he hides among caves and ruins, time fractures: ancient shipwreck surfaces, and memories from different centuries bleed into one another. The sea becomes a liminal archive, transforming a soldier’s flight into an encounter with the forgotten and the unknowable.

Discover the latest immersive events, festivals, workshops, and more at our new site EVERYTHING IMMERSIVE, home of NoPro’s show listings.

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