Full disclosure: this festival is organized by the author.
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.
A screenshot from FIVARS 2020 – captured by Ana Ballano
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:
This year we feature works from over a dozen countries, including some we have not seen represented until now: Lebanon, Qatar, Brazil. We have original theater from Austria, folkloric festivals from Spain, and heart-warming documentaries from Puerto Rico, the American Midwest, Australia, and Canada. We have Incredible animation and oddities for those who seek the outre and bizarre. We even have the world premiere of a new music video from two-time Grammy award nominee Steve Roach, whose beautiful ambient records I have been listening to for the past 25 years. The video features groundbreaking visual effects by Audri Phillips of Robot Prayers.
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.
One response to “How A VR Festival Is Showcasing A New Kind of International Cinema”
It was awesome!! Thank you so much Keram and Co. for this unique experience