Poland’s emerging media lab and production company Betwixt Foundation reveals the poster artwork for BEING IN YOU, the mixed-reality documentary by Michał Stankiewicz, created with musician and geologist Cat Janice before and after her death. The project currently celebrates its world premiere in the Venice Immersive Competition, part of the Venice Film Festival, and marks the first Polish production to ever compete in the XR strand.
About the project: In January 2024, singer and geologist Cat Janice released “Dance You Outta My Head” from hospice and watched it climb to number one on the TikTok Billboard Top 50, having signed the rights over to her young son so the proceeds would go to him. She died weeks later, on 28 February 2024, at 31. In the time before and after her death, she was building something else with director Michał Stankiewicz. One last work, made around her voice, her music, and her presence: BEING IN YOU. A mixed-reality documentary which reverses embodiment: instead of you stepping into Cat’s world, Cat asks whether she can step into yours, into your senses, your imagination, even your body’s movements. A tender duet between the living and the no-longer-living, an intimate encounter with the digital afterlife, holding someone’s echo of existence.
‘Stories – and particularly virtual worlds – often invite us to inhabit another person’s perspective’, Stankiewicz says. ‘With BEING IN YOU, I wanted to reverse that familiar gesture: rather than asking the audience to look through Cat’s eyes, the work asks Cat to encounter the viewer through their own body. We developed the project together over two years, recording the voiceover and the script together through rehearsal, improvisation, and many conversations, while also doing scans of her rooms on her phone. We used XR as a way of lingering in the present for as long as possible, even as we knew our time together was uncertain. What remains are not only recordings, images, music and research, but the possibility of activating those traces anew. Instead of reconstructing Cat as something fixed, we created an experience in which she can return through movement, attention and the viewer’s imagination. When she asks you to smile, touch the ground, look around her room or breathe alongside her, your body becomes part of the work—and, for a moment, a place through which she can exist again.”
BEING IN YOU is produced and created by Michał Stankiewicz, with Ash Eliza Smith as the Creative Producer, Co-writer and Co-dramaturge. Martyna Nitkowska as the Executive Producer and Jakub Oleś as the lead developer with support from Random Error Studio (Budapest, HU) and Michael Barngrover (XR4Europe) It is co-financed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage under the Creative Industries Institute’s own programme: ‘Development of Creative Sectors’. This project has been made possible by the City of Warsaw artistic scholarship programme. A Polish Film Institute co-financed production.
