The Venice Gap-Financing Market returns for its 10th edition (Sept. 1-3), with a selection of 14 immersive pieces and 11 Biennale College Cinema – Virtual Reality projects that will have the opportunity to close their international financing, through one-on-one meetings with international decision-makers, in the context of the Venice Production Bridge of the Venice Biennale.
We contacted three of the teams behind the selected works to find out more about them and what they expect from this market. Today we present the first, AN EMPTY SEAT, an immersive story about family that uses virtual reality and a touch of artificial intelligence to discuss emotional trauma and the strength needed to overcome it.
Here’s what the director, Johan Knattrup Jensen, told us.
AN EMPTY SEAT, synopsis
After the war, the Larsen family emigrated from Denmark to Canada, using their experience as mink farmers to provide a foundation for a new life for the family. They soon founded their own mink farm, Larsen Fur. For the past 40 years, the farm has been firmly administered by the matriarch, Helena, until her very recent unexpected death. She and John had four children, all of whom are now adults. They no longer speak to each other. The family is torn apart emotionally, perhaps because of Helena’s waywardness.
As a stay-at-home dad, John has been the children’s closest friend and confidant. Now he’s invited the entire family to the traditional, but sombre Easter weekend with a plan to both reunite the family and get everyone to sign off on the sale of the farm, so the family can finally heal from Helena’s corrosive reign.
But the weekend stirs up the family’s old patterns and traumas, and the otherwise repressed ghosts of the past soon emerge from the shadows to dance on the Easter table until dawn.
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On the content of AN EMPTY SEAT
JOHAN KNATTRUP JENSEN – In its core AN EMPTY SEAT is a exploration of the many ways family members are linked to each other. For better or worse – what beside the blood makes us a family?
And more precisely, we are exploring how the actions of a parent will manifest itself in her or his children. In the case of AN EMPTY SEAT it’s the actions of the matriarch Helena, who controlled the family business, which has sustained the family for generations. Apparantly she gave everything for the business, leaving the care of the children to her husband. But was it her sacrifice or narcissism, that drove her? After her sudden passing, the legacy of Helena is to be debated and decided by her four grown up children and husband.
In the book by Gabor Maté, In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts, he describes how emotional traumas can be passed on through generations, and how addiction is caused by the long term distortion of traumas. This unconscious passing on of our traumas is something that makes us a family. How we choose to respond to those traumas is what makes us individuals.
On the technology used of for the piece
J. K. J. – When Mads and I did The Doghouse in 2014, we discovered how the combination of VR and POV had a profound effect on our audiences; they experienced ‘their’ character in story as if it was themselves. The character, so to speak, extended into the emotional body of the individual audience member, creating a bond between the character and the audience that even felt physical: the pain was real.
This discovery is something that we want to develop further, and thus why we want to embark on this new exploration of the invisible dynamics and trauma-tied bonds between members of a family.
The Doghouse was a first voyage in the early days of VR, so the quality was rather poor. Still, it proved to be a groundbreaking piece of VR, that toured the world and amazed audiences since its release. Time has passed, computers, cameras and goggles are getting better, and with the release of the Apple Vision Pro the quality has improved to a new standardized level, where we feel comfortable in setting out on a new journey.
The impact of POV VR on storytelling
POV VR is the closest we can get to the character. By ‘becoming’ or embodying the character, the audience transcends the role of bystander or witness and becomes an active participant (as in a RPG or LARP, but through cinema).
But how do you feel about the other characters in the film? In a family, those who should be the closest sometimes feel the most distant. Is there a way to get closer to those in your family? Is there a way to learn to love, even if they have caused so much pain?
Through storytelling, POV VR have the potential to put us as close as possible to ourselves and thereby experience other people as ourselves. It is all about minimizing the actual emotional distance between audience and character, enabling real attachment to the deeper layers of the story.
If there is a way to overcome the emotional distance between family members, it may be found through stories told with the use of POV VR.
Of course the story cannot be told as a ‘normal’ film. It needs to be told through different individual POV perspectives. Each of the audience members is the main character of their own narrative arc, while still part of the same story where the same events and dialogues happen. Each perspective is experienced differently, through a different framing of the story and a different tone.
Imagine experiencing the entire Succession (a/n Succession is a popular tv-show produced by HBO Entertainment) only through Greg. And then only through Shiv. How would the series be different? What would change? Would you change your views? Would you change your personality? Succession is an amazing show, and they almost managed to focus evenly on all family members. AN EMPTY SEAT is able to take that final step toward complete and evenly distributed subjectivity and empowerment.
On the Venice Gap-Financing Market
We’ve been in development since 2022, and have been funded through both the Canadian and Danish film boards.
Emmanuel Schwartz, the mesmerizing Canadian actor and playwriter, is onboard as co-writer, and he and I have written the first synopsis and character bible.
Last year, the team made a first prototype in Canada to explore some early ideas about how to experience the different scenes.
At the Finance Gap we hope to find international distribution and production partners to be a key part of the next development phase, as the format of AN EMPTY SEAT and its production and distribution need to be tightly woven together to create an utterly unique experience that will catapult the next era of entertainment.
AN EMPTY SEAT (Canada, Denmark) is an immersive project created by Johan Knattrup Jensen, Mads Damsbo and Line Sander Egede (Art et essai, Makropol). You can discover more about Johan Knattrup Jensen and Mads Damsbo’s other project, take a look at Anthropia (2017) and The Shared Individual (2016).
The 2023 Venice Gap-Financing will take place at the Hotel Excelsior in Lido, Venice, from September 1 to 3. You can download the official brochure in pdf format at the following link: Venice Gap-Financing
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