David Bowie shares the bill with starmen, firefighters and Walt Disney wolves at the 10th anniversary edition of Venice Immersive, the film festival\u2019s pioneering showcase for new forms of storytelling. David Bowie: Unseen Unheard \u2013 a 3D documentary featuring hundreds of previously unseen images \u2013 is among 69 XR (extended reality) pieces playing at the event\u2019s regular base on Lazzaretto Vecchio, a repurposed small island off the Venice Lido.<\/p>\n
Venice Immersive\u2019s 10th birthday marks a milestone for an event which aims to provide a bridge between emergent technology and traditional narrative cinema. But the programme\u2019s organisers are at pains to emphasise the ongoing scope of a project that has in recent years prompted similar sections at the Cannes, Geneva and Toronto film festivals. \u201cThis is not a retrospective,\u201d declares the official festival blurb that welcomes guests to the island. It almost sounds like a warning.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is such a fast-evolving medium,\u201d says Liz Rosenthal, Venice Immersive\u2019s co-curator. \u201cWe\u2019re basically witnessing new forms of art being crafted in real time. So we\u2019re already looking forward to the next 10 years. I think we\u2019re very much at a turning point in terms of the platforms and technology that\u2019s available \u2013 and this in turn will shape the nature of the storytelling itself.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sound and vision \u2026 David Bowie on stage at the Serious Moonlight tour in 1983, a scene from David Bowie: Unseen Unheard. Photograph: Denis O\u2019Regan<\/p>\n
Billed as an immersive spatial-sound documentary, David Bowie: Unseen Unheard is a personal portrait of the singer by Denis O\u2019Regan, who worked as Bowie\u2019s official photographer. The installation plays out across eight screens and 84 hidden speakers, folding 12 Bowie songs alongside O\u2019Regan\u2019s commentary and archive of nearly 800 photographs. Bowie died in 2016, but the project was conceived and developed with the full support and cooperation of the late singer\u2019s estate.<\/p>\n
\u201cDavid would have loved this, definitely,\u201d O\u2019Regan says. \u201cAnd he would have loved it going into the Venice film festival. He was always a bit of a groundbreaker. David loved his technology. He loved making things happen and experimenting with new ideas, like his Bowie bonds or Bowie.net<\/a>. Listen to the Aladdin Sane album<\/a> from 1973 and he\u2019s already writing lyrics like, \u2018Pour me out another phone, I\u2019ll ring and see if your friends are home\u2019. The thing about David is that he wasn\u2019t just about the music. He was about mime, visuals, theatre, film.\u201d It is this hybrid quality, O\u2019Regan adds, that makes him a natural fit for Venice Immersive.<\/p>\n Fittingly, David Bowie: Unseen Unheard rubs shoulders with a rogues\u2019 gallery of genre-defying new work from around the globe. The climate crisis is a major focus at this year\u2019s edition, with Felix Gaedtke and Gayatri Parameswaran\u2019s Solomon Islands-set Solwata, Barth\u00e9lemy Antoine-Loeff and Hugo Arcier\u2019s interactive The White Saboteur and the LA wildfire documentary Out of the Ashes all tackling the issue of human-made climate change.<\/p>\n Other potential highlights include the immersive nature documentaries Gal\u00e1pagos: The Last Eden and Disneynature\u2019s Wolf, which conducts a virtual tour of Canada\u2019s remote Ellesmere Island. James Elliott Mizroch\u2019s VR installation Smithsonian Starstruck goes further still, inviting users to step inside the cosmos to watch a star being born.<\/p>\n \u201cThe first years of Venice Immersive were more about experimentation,\u201d says Rosenthal. \u201cThe pieces were either playing with the various formats or they were these small side projects of big media properties. Now we\u2019re seeing big works that have a proper distribution strategy. That means that the work has a life that extends far beyond the island. They can be seen and enjoyed by people around the world.\u201d<\/p>\n