“You are going to get goosebumps”: Can the work showcased at Venice Immersive help draw global audiences?

It is almost a decade since curators Liz Rosenthal and Michel Reilhac introduced the groundbreaking immersive strand at the Venice Film Festival in 2016.

The first major festival to establish such a sidebar, it has premiered work from Mathias Chelebourg’s Rencontre(s), an interactive and multi-sensory project that features the voice of Marion Cotillard as Coco Chanel through VR spin-off game Peaky Blinders: The King’s Ransom to last year’s art historical journey Tonight With The Impressionists, and led the way for other festivals including Cannes to launch similar strands.

For Melanie Coombs, a producer on Rose Bond’s 1968, one of this year’s Venice Immersive entries, which takes as its starting point the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, the “live” aspect of immersive work is key to the sector’s continuing creativity and potential growth.

“Everyone is scrambling to work out what people will go out for,” she says. “It doesn’t matter how great your sound system is at home, or how big your telly is, if we put you in our dome with 17 speakers around you, you are going to get goose bumps and that’s something worth going out for.”

Yet questions persist about when a viable market for financing and distributing VR and immersive work will emerge.

Rosenthal believes the market is already here, referring to an ongoing boom in ‘Location Based Entertainment’ (LBE) VR with gaming arcades, theme parks and shopping malls all successfully offering large-scale multi-user experiences. French outfit Excurio, for example, has attracted over a million visitors worldwide to Horizon Of Khufu, an “immersive expedition to Ancient Egypt,” which recently showed in London and is still running in New York and Calgary – a 45-minute show costing around $40 a ticket.

Other Excurio works, such as Tonight With The Impressionists, which screened in Venice Immersive last year, and Eternal Notre-Dame, have likewise done bumper business everywhere from France to China, where there is huge and growing demand for LBE entertainment. 

Some traditional sales agents and distributors are also becoming more involved in the VR and immersive world. French exhibition, distribution and production outfit mk2 has been adapting some of its existing venues to accommodate immersive work, while fellow French company Diversion has partnered with Dutch distributor Cassette on Nu:Reality, a VR programme that brings immersive work to several Benelux cinemas.

As Reilhac notes, lines between cinema, performing arts and VR are fast blurring. L’Ombre by Blanca Li and Edith Canat De Chizy, in competition at Venice Immersive this year, features 10 human performers dancing with virtual partners in a show that can be experienced by up to 200 spectators at the same time.

“When you can sell a lot of tickets for one single show, it starts coming closer to the economic model of cinema,” he says.

Commercial operators are coming into the sector too. At a ‘Curator’s Network’ event in Cannes in May dedicated to accelerating distribution opportunities for immersive art, attendees included property developers putting their money on future audiences wanting collective out-of-home VR and immersive experiences.

Many of the artists and filmmakers with projects in this year’s Venice Immersive already have firm distribution plans in place. Coombs’ 2024 work Earths To Come was picked by France’s Diversion, the company she describes as “the strongest distributor in this emerging marketplace.”  (1968 does not yet have a distribution plan in place.)

Danish VR and immersive pioneer Mads Damsbo’s Dark Rooms, a documentary about sexual awakening, also screening in the immersive competition, is taking a different route. Damsbo and his team will use “a roadshow model,” travelling from town to town and splitting revenues with host theatres or operators.

For Elisabetta Rotolo’s Venice Immersive multiplayer entry, Black Cats & Chequered Flags, about the 1950s Formula One champ Alberto Ascari, the Italian filmmaker has set up a partnership with Ferrari that will screen the project at Musei Ferrari. She said she is already in negotiations with operators and museums to show the work in the US, UK, France and Qatar. 

Venue hunting

Nonetheless, as Pascal Diot, head of Venice Production Bridge, cautions, at least for now, distribution of auteur-driven VR and immersive filmmaking is often still hampered by a lack of suitable venues. 

Another continuing problem is VR headsets have not been as widely adopted as was anticipated. Shipments of headsets are forecast to decline in 2025.

“The platforms, with Meta being the most important one, have sort of given up on anything that is non-game,” Reilhac suggests. The equipment is still cumbersome and the platforms take a conservative view toward content, frowning on anything with nudity or that might be adult-oriented, or too “political” in its messaging.

Rosenthal, though, believes the headsets coming on to the market are encouraging big directors to experiment in narrative-driven VR pieces – and that audiences will follow. Doug Liman, the US director of Swingers and The Bourne Identity, is attending Venice Immersive with his XR thriller Asteroid about strangers on a perilous rocket ride. It will be released through Google’s new Android XR headset, developed with Samsung. And Oscar and Bafta-winning German director Edward Berger is presenting his short film, Submerged, made for Apple Immersive.

Diot predicts the gamechanger is going to be VR glasses, new models of which are being finessed by Apple and Google. He also predicts there will be a VR and immersive distribution system similar to that for arthouse cinema within five years. It is why Venice is continuing to throw its weight behind VR and immersive work.

“We have more and more people coming,” Diot says of rising visitor numbers crossing the lagoon and heading to the Venice Immersive Island, artists, manufacturers, distributors and a very curious public among them.

“It is important to understand, help and stay together with them in the evolution of all this technology,” he believes. 

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