The lineup for next year’s Sundance Film Festival was announced this week and 10 VR projects made the cut.
All of the VR content is, as usual, included as part of the festival’s New Frontier selection. There’s 15 total projects in the selection this year, with 10 specifically for VR — an increase from this year’s 7 out of 14 New Frontier projects.
It’s a varied selection, a mix of in-person, online, live and on-demand events, presented across many different forms of VR content.
Projects like Flat Earth VR (by Where Thoughts Go developer Lucas Rizzotto), pictured above, will enter the realm of VR satire, immersing you in the quest of a flat earther to travel to space and prove the haters wrong by taking a picture of our pancake planet.
Meanwhile projects like Suga’, Cosmogony and Gondwana will err into live performance territory, each offering an experience that is either live, dynamic or time-dependent in some way.
Gondwana, pictured below, places you in the Daintree rain forest in the middle of a 24-hour sequence that repeats through the duration of the festival. Every 14 minutes, time jumps forward a year and highlights existing and future degradation brought on by climate change and climate data projections. It’s a dynamic experience wherein the more people who take part in Gondwana, the more the forest becomes resilient.
After this year’s Sundance Festival back in February, we wrote a bit about the selection as a whole and what it represents for the immersive VR media landscape:
My takeaway from this year’s selection reaches an all-too-familiar conclusion; wondrous potential, genuine enthusiasm and arresting innovation are at war with budget constraints, technical proficiency and films that, frankly, don’t need to be in VR.
We rounded off our summary by remaining optimistic that a future selection might see creators tap into meatier opportunities and experiences that set the VR medium apart from the pack. Could 2022 be the year? We’ll have to wait and see.
You can read more about next year’s schedule over at the Sundance Festival site.
