The 6th annual FIVARS Festival of International Virtual & Augmented Reality Stories

In a time when attention deficit runs high and news and marketing bombard us from all sides, immersive stories have a singular ability to envelop the viewer and transmit context and culture that is so often missed. I firmly believe in nurturing the evolution of this medium, which has enormous transformative power and untapped potential.

Since we created the FIVARS festival in 2015, we have pushed our small and intrepid team to its limits to maintain the highest standards while pushing the outer limits of what a 21st-century festival can be. We have always been as focused on new approaches to user experience as we have been uncompromising in our search for the finest new content creators from around the globe.

In June of 2020, we rapidly iterated and launched a true spatialized conference in the web browser, studying, learning and building upon the very latest techniques, code, design principles and ideas for what socially distanced conferencing can become. Almost immediately following, we had to bring together six years of experience and input to do the same for our beloved, public-facing immersive stories festival.

As always, FIVARS 2020 is an experiment. Building on extremely powerful, highly customized open-source code, powered by a grant from Amazon Web Services, we have designed a truly independent, spatialized, accessibility-minded platform for the exhibition of instant-on 4K, spherical video with ambisonic or 5.1 audio that runs in your browser with no buffering time, proprietary software or downloads required.

Check out this video that explains how this online virtual theater for immersive content works and some of its features:

Here are a few more selections:

Inside Lieutenant Gustl Based on a play by Arthur Schnitzler and being one of the first virtual theatre experiences, “Inside Lieutenant Gustl” immerses the viewer in the mental headspace of a young Austrian officer from 1900 grappling with an existential crisis. Missing Pictures: Birds of Prey Hard times, bad luck, tight spots, mishaps, quarrels, setbacks, hiccups, destiny…some films, it seems, become recipes for misfortune, never to see the light of day.

Swing VR The story unfolds in overlapping acts that depict the internal and external struggles of a frustrated girl who is attempting – and failing – to swing on a playground swing. As she struggles with the swing, she imagines the demise of the children swinging successfully around her. Indirect Actions Join a documentary filmmaker on a mission for justice at Standing Rock, where over 300 indigenous tribes stood together in solidarity against the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Hominidae Creatures have evolved in surprising ways, with humans, birds, spiders and frogs sharing unique anatomies. This experience follows an Arachnid Hominid, an intelligent creature with human and spider physiology, as she struggles to raise her young in a hostile environment. Mutatis At night, strange men in white suits enter a botanical garden. A young woman’s inanimate body is found there. The garden hides other bodies, buried, sunk in the deep flora. Then, a strange light appears from the women’s bodies…

Sleeping Eyes A Korean soldier compares his undiagnosed narcolepsy to quantum mechanics in this eerie memoir. Warsaw Rising A Warsaw insurgent received a note with a message from his daughter when he was leaving to fight in the Uprising in August 1944. At the time, he did not know yet that the note would influence his further fate.

With the Wind and the Stars With the Wind and the Stars is a 360/VR docuseries that takes you on an adventure into the lives of women who fly. Episode One features Teara Fraser: a pilot, mother, and proud Métis woman setting out to launch her own airline. A Safe Guide to Dying The quest of a self-deprecating man exploring different suicide methods inside a lifelike video game simulation.

In the shadow of the FAANG companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Netflix controlling what we see, how we see it and for how much, it is more important than ever to build spaces that belong to artists, creators and programmers, beholden to no one.

FIVARS launched October 7th and runs through November 2nd, 2020, showcasing an expertly-curated selection of immersive experiences from around the world.

For more information, visit
https://fivars.net 

Find Tickets

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In this terse and short-lived sequel (the film clocks in just over an hour) you get it all: pissing cock, furry vaginas and bad complexions. Clark is interested in the unreserved experience of adolescence in every way it comes, seen through a cinematic lens. The verité performances are always a welcome respite from the the slick hair-shine aplomb of the MCU plague (with all respects to Mr. Lee).

The deceptively off the-cuff-style still belies is constructed nature, using only essential dialogue and beats. Undoubtedly there is a mountain of footage that ends up on the cutting room floor. These films create the very experience they are pretending to recreate. Nothing in cinema can get you much closer to the true feeling of sweat and vertigo of making it through days, with all the shit that drags along with it than a Clark film and he has only improved on the method.

As Clark states: “I don’t try to be controversial, I just try to be honest and tell the truth about life. Coming from the art world, I never think there are things you can’t do or show. I think that Hollywood films are really underestimating their audience. I’ve been an artist for many, many years. I’m not interested in making films to make money. I’m interested in making work that I’m satisfied with, showing people’s lives that aren’t shown. If I could see this anywhere else, I wouldn’t have to make these films.”

This is visceral work, literally warts and all. You can often feel the actors pushing their way through the improv, seeking, faltering, but the filmmakers find the beats – editors and Affonso Goncalves and Margaret Reville have done a tremendous job with pacing and capturing the moments. They may capture a hand on a thigh, a sunray on a pockmarked face, the wide open eyes of an infant, as the inexorable pace hammers on. So many cues afforded through these nuanced inserts. The angles, the music.

But this never feels like exploitation; it’s looking at childcare, unemployment, mental illness and substance abuse, crime, loyalty and obligation, domestic violence in an uncompromising way.

Marfa Girl 2 cinematographer David Newbert uses a high key lighting approach to look unflinchingly at these 17-years-old coming-of-age and falling face first into adult obligations – from raising children to paying the rent. These are raw vignettes strung together in emotional sequence.

Mary Farley, who has the unusual job of playing the only adult in the entire film, is unfiltered and unafraid, driving of line of reason through a human wasteland. Drake Burnette, who plays the titular Marfa, gives a chilling monologue center-piece that is just so full of abandon and provocation as to burn indelibly into the mind. And yet she is almost secondary to the many stories colliding here. Until the terrifying outcome makes itself known.

In an era of frightening cultural gentrification and thought inoculation, Marfa Girl 2 is essential viewing.

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Standing on the runway in California, they have not even two pennies to hail a cab, whereupon they encounter a Yuppie with a car who offers them a lift to Nicole’s aunt’s house. This character, played by SNL’s Will Forte eventually has some sort of psychotic episode and the movie never fully returns from this tone. Episode after episode of strange behavior from all characters, deus ex machinas, and non-sequiturs lead to a rocky narrative strand but ultimately something that is refreshingly original.

The two leads – Weixler and Prediger that is – hold on strong and deliver nuanced and at times truly multi-layered performances, both dramatically and intellectually – something more likely due to the fact that they are so cognizant of the material they have written and directed. I even had a few glimpses of something altogether ancient, the rough-shod and earnest acting found in the films 70’s filmmakers like John Cassavettes or Sydney Lumet catching me off-guard.

Prediger, who spends much of the film mourning the death of a “friend” plays the beautifully restrained, but textured straight man to Weixler’s more over the top tortured artist. Weixler, who may be most famous for her role in the nearly avant-garde dark comedy “Teeth,” is destined to become a far bigger Hollywood star than she is presently, and an indie platform like this is what is going to finally catapult her. This may or may not be the one that does it, but it’s only a matter of time.

In the end, Apartment Troubles is an engaging, twisting, and even alluring festival film wrapped in marketing better suited for a Gary Marshall holiday picture. I recommend it to the indie crowd but would caution suburban parents looking for a fun night out that this may not be what they expect. I myself, was happily surprised to discover a film for an under-addressed generation, that is to say, the one presently walking the streets.

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Godard does with 3D in Goodbye to Language what he did to cinema’s conventions with Breathless. Pushing dimension into low-grade cell phone footage, or exaggerating the depth to the extreme of a street scene, at times rendering different images in each eye. But the surprising star of the show was the play of sound, volume in particular. The event’s host told us that the projectionist wanted the disclaimer made that all extreme leaps in volume are deliberate and not a technical error.

“I have always detested characters. From birth, we are forced into them.”

In this vein, Goodbye to Language is an ontological exploration actually well-served by the exploitation of the media’s limits: Immediately in the title sequence, Godard delineates the 2D from 3D planes and then effectively makes the 2D the more reliable, as 3D low-grade images smear across in the background, searching, searching, just the like the dog upon which he spends most of the film – pointing out that through the gaze of an animal are we able to access the real world.

Friday, January 23 – Thursday, January 29, 2015
Exclusive Los Angeles Engagement – 3D
Aero Theatre Santa Monica
1328 Montana Avenue, Santa Monica, 90403
More information at American Cinemateque

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From Zeitgeist films, two things struck me about this epic film – the incredibly personal footage that the filmmaker captured amidst the pandemonium and sheer size of this movement, and the insight it affords into one of the most powerful but least understood countries in the world. In spite of its scope, it focuses on the individuals and tells a powerfully intimate human story.

Last Train Home – official US trailer:

Sweetgrass (2009)
“As much a work of cultural anthropology as it is a documentary, this unique film traces the path of a family of Montana sheepherders as they drive their flock down from the treacherous and beautiful Absaroka Beartooth mountain range. With no guiding narration, filmmakers Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor let the natural images speak for themselves, capturing the danger, pathos and humor in this haunting elegy to a bygone way of life.”

If there is a thing that links the five films I have selected together, it is the ability of the filmmakers to render from seemingly abstract subjects, legitimately engaging stories focused on the people inside of their contexts. On the surface, Sweetgrass may appear a remote subject to city dwellers, and yet it works as an analogy that in spite of the incredible feats of which we are capable, the greatest obstacle is often within our own minds. An awe-inspiring document of a reality leaving the modern world perhaps forever.

The trailer for Sweetgrass:

The Cool School (2007)
“In the late 1950s, when Pollock and de Kooning were being hailed as revolutionary artists in New York, Los Angeles was still dealing with a blacklist that gutted creativity in all media. This is the story of the two men who changed all that. Recording a pledge on a hot dog wrapper to open a cutting-edge gallery, Walter Hopps and Ed Kienholz took the West Coast art world by storm, embracing artists from Marcel Duchamp to Andy Warhol.”

Los Angeles is a city like no other. It is a lens and a megaphone, a magnet to the luminaries of so many small villages scattered around the world that transforms and ignites their minds. And yet it is often looked upon as a vapid cultural cesspool. In The Cool School we explore the transformation of a dustbowl into a hotbed of cultural significance that would be exported and impact perceptions of popular culture irrevocably.

The Cool School trailer:

Superheroes (2011)
“Filmmaker Michael Barnett takes on the ultimate odd job in this eye-opening documentary about real-life “superheroes,” ordinary people who don capes, masks and alter egos in their spare time to right wrongs and make criminals pay for their actions. Among other characters, you’ll meet a tight-knit Brooklyn foursome that tackles tough cases as a squad dubbed the New York Initiative and a San Diego security officer who calls himself Mr. Xtreme.”

We collectively pay a lot of money into the blockbusters centered around the fantastical comic book heroes that raised us. Some take these examples of benevolence, courage, public service and yes, pageantry to heart, and in a quest to emulate them, find ways to substantiate their obsession by attempting to make them real. Beyond the rubber-necking curiosity that these real-life characters may elicit, comes a poignant message about being proactive and taking the risk to make a change in the world as opposed to a passive onlooker, judging their often dangerous lifestyle from the sidelines. A parable about taking responsibility and not simply being an innocuous voice of dissent.

Here is the trailer:

Samsara
“A nonverbal film described by the makers as a “guided meditation”. The film uses very high quality images, scenes of nature and mankind to stimulate the viewer. The film contains no plot or actors, although there are several performers in the film. Samsara is Ron Fricke’s 2011 follow-up to Baraka.”

In the picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words spirit of Baraka or Koyaanisqatsi, “Samsara” affords us yet another lovingly executed, desperate look at our beautiful planet. At present, Samara, which had its world premier at the Toronto International Film Festival is awaiting distribution. You can help coordinate a screening at the official site.

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