“It’s time to make immersive creation part of the long history of the narrative arts” – Thierry Frémaux, Elie Levasseur (Cannes Film Festival – Immersive Competition)

After several years at the heart of the Market, and a reduced presence in favor of a broader discussion of innovation with Cannes NEXT, virtual reality (and immersive creation as a whole) is back in force at the heart of the Official Selection of the Cannes Film Festival! Alejandro González Iñárritu paved the way back in 2017; now, festival-goers will be able to discover 2 complete selections of works over the ten days of the event. Thierry Frémaux, General Delegate of the Cannes Film Festival, and Elie Levasseur, Immersive Competition Project Director, explain this major change.

Cover: HUMAN VIOLINS – PRELUDE (multi-user version), Ioana Mischie

Immersive is back (Official Selection)

XRMust – As Cannes already has a history of immersive programming on the Market side, could you go back over the creation of the Immersive Competition in Official Selection (a first since 2017)? And the Festival’s interest in innovation, joining leading festivals in offering an XR selection in official competition?

Elie Levasseur, Immersive Competition Project Director – I think it’s a mistake to interpret the launch of the Immersive Competition as the Festival’s desire to follow a trend… The Festival de Cannes has always been driven by an independent and pioneering spirit. The Festival de Cannes was the first to screen digital films, and the first to include a VR experience in its official selection with Alejandro González Iñárritu’s CARNE Y ARENA. The Cannes Festival has always embodied this visionary spirit. It’s simply a matter of measuring up to what’s involved in launching a new competition. Creating an Immersive Competition necessarily raises a certain number of long-term questions, which also require a minimum of hindsight regarding the way in which artists appropriate this new medium, and the way in which this new medium will be able to make a lasting mark on the history of narrative arts. This, I believe, is an essential difference: the Immersive Competition tackles the question of innovation, but through an artistic prism, whereas the Marché du Film can be much more reactive and sensitive to technological innovation itself.

Immersive Competition (lien)

• EN AMOUR, Claire Bardainne, Adrien Mondot, Laurent Bardainne
• EVOLVER, Barnaby Steel, Ersin Han Ersin, Robin McNicholas
• HUMAN VIOLINS – PRELUDE (multi-user version), Ioana Mischie
• MAYA: THE BIRTH OF A SUPERHERO, Poulomi Basu, CJ Clarke
• COLORED, Tania de Montaigne, Stéphane Foenkinos, Pierre-Alain Giraud (see our interview)
• TELOS I, Dorotea Saykaly, Emil Dam Seidel
• THE ROAMING, Mathieu Pradat
• TRAVERSING THE MIST, Tung-Yen Chou

Immersive Selection (Non-Competitive Works) (lien)

• SPHERES, Eliza McNitt (see our interview)
• NOTES ON BLINDNESS: INTO DARKNESS,Arnaud Colinart, Amaury La Burthe, Peter Middleton, James Spinney
• GLOOMY EYES, Fernando Maldonado, Jorge Tereso (see our interview)
• EMPEREUR, Marion Burger, Ilan J. Cohen (see our interview)
• BATTLESCAR, Martin Allais, Nico Casavecchia (see our interview)

XRMust – How did the programming go, with what committee and what objectives for this first edition? What was the selection committee’s view of the formats and narratives of today’s highly protean immersive industry (including non-headset, VR, AR, MR…)?

E. L. – The selection committee brought together four independent experts, members of the team and the General Delegate of the Cannes Festival. For this selection, we were driven by two essential objectives:

The first was to illustrate through our choice that immersive technologies are at the origin of a new art form. To do this, we felt it was essential to demonstrate the medium’s ability to embrace different artistic intentions, and support different forms of expression. We had to show that cinema’s ability to tell stories of different genres, from different points of view, according to different types of narrative structure – that the richness that makes cinema a medium – could be transposed. Better still, that immersive technology could enable us to envisage other types of narration, different from those we’re used to seeing on screen. Interactive narratives, multisensory fictions, mixed-reality documentaries embodied in your immediate real environment, first-person stories… Through this selection and these 8 works, it’s the potential of the immersive medium that we wanted to celebrate.

Our second objective was to address the specific target of film professionals. As our audience is particularly attached to collective experiences and storytelling, we felt it was important to demystify the idea that immersive storytelling is primarily aimed at gamers or responds to an individualistic mode of consumption. By choosing deliberately narrative and collective works, we hope to give film professionals the desire to come and explore what is probably still for many, a new territory of expression and narrative pleasures…

XRMust – How is the on-site exhibition organized? Circulation space, access arrangements, jury, etc.

E. L. – It’s essential for us to be able to offer the same quality of treatment to immersive works as to feature films in the way they are viewed and presented to the public. Presenting immersive works inside the Palais did not offer these guarantees. We therefore chose two spaces located opposite each other: the Cinéum de Cannes and the Université Côte d’Azur. Together, these 2 spaces offer us an exhibition area of 1300m2. What’s more, for the past 3 years, the Cinéum has been an official venue at the Cannes Film Festival, screening films in the Official Competition. With free shuttles running every 6 to 12 minutes to facilitate transport, nearly 35,000 spectators attended screenings last year. This should provide excellent visibility for the exhibition on the first floor. To avoid long waits, a booking service dedicated to immersive works and accessible from our website will be set up a week before the opening.

Renewed interest in immersive formats

XRMust – In the long term, does the festival intend to offer not only an official selection, but also conferences, markets and B2B activities?

Thierry Frémaux, Délégué général du Festival de Cannes – The raison d’être of the Cannes Film Festival is to showcase the best in cinema, to contribute to its evolution and to encourage the development of the film industry worldwide. In the long term, we want to achieve the same result for the immersive works we showcase, and distribution is undeniably one of the major challenges. Thanks to the Sélection officielle and the Marché du Film, we have two powerful levers to create opportunities and support the distribution of immersive works worldwide. Presenting a work at Cannes will play a major role in promoting it. The competition is there to give a voice to new voices and new artistic approaches, and to forge a new link with the industry and the general public.

E. L. – With Cannes Next, the Marché du Film will be able to offer, as it does every year, a number of conferences and events likely to be of interest to XR and AI professionals. The possibility of offering market activities dedicated to immersive formats in 2025 is part of our thinking, but it’s a little too early to talk about it in detail.

XRMust – A non-competition program focusing on Atlas V, and emblematic projects from recent years; how did this proposal emerge, and how was this line-up put together? Is the intention to offer a carte blanche every year?

E. L. – I wouldn’t call it an “out-of-compétition”, or even a “carte blanche”, because even though Atlas V designed the scenography for this space, we were the ones who came up with the concept: what we wanted to do, like many museum exhibitions, was to contextualize the works and propose an exploration of the medium through the career of one of its most eminent figures, in this case, the Atlas V studio. Indeed, Atlas V is a studio that stands out, I believe, both for the quality of its catalog and for its ability to trace a unique furrow in the history of the narrative arts, at the crossroads between cinema and virtual reality. The result is an exhibition entitled “Le cinéma hors du cadre, une introduction à la réalité virtuelle”. We’re not yet ready to assess whether we’re going to repeat this type of exhibition, but I like to think that part of the recognition of this medium as a new art form lies in its ability to change the way the public and the media look at it. I think it’s time to develop a reflexive distance, to move away from purely technological astonishment and place immersive creation within the long history of the narrative arts. That’s what we’re trying to do.

Immersive Competition website

Official Press Release