Practicum and Training

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Hsu Chih-Yen
Taiwan / 2019 / 17’

★ 2021 Beyond the Frame Film Festival Grand Prix
★ 2020 Venice Film Festival
★ 2020 Tribeca Film Festival
★ 2019 Kaohsiung Film Festival

In the summer afternoon, the family gathers at the old house. They surround grandma to show their love, even though she’s no longer able to move, react or hear clearly. As people come and go, the television keeps replaying and the fan is still running in the peaceful old house, where the grandma and her maid live.

Chroma 11
Tsang Tsui Shan
Hong Kong / 2022 / 13’

★ 2022 Venice Film Festival Venice Immersive

Chroma 11 is a Virtual Reality immersive experience based on the true story of lost love. As an extension of the dance documentary film Ward 11, which documented the heart-rending last days of dance artist Aaron Khek Ah Hock and his partner Ix Wong Thien-pau. The Chroma 11 project expands the boundaries of moving images with VR technology. Through clips of rearranged memories and volumetric video captured by DepthKit, the creative team strives to reconstruct a reunion of the parted souls in the form of a duo dance after life.

Fight Back
Celine Tricart
France, USA / 2022 / 40’

★ 2022 Venice Film Festival Official Competition

“A long time ago, the First Star defeated Darkness. But today, Shadows have come back and stars have disappeared from the skies once again. Last-born, what can you do to save your sisters?”

Fight Back is an interactive experience with hand-tracking enabled, aiming at developing mental skills, confidence and muscle memory.

Afterimage for Tomorrow
Singing Chen
Taiwan / 2018 / 19’

Welcome to the “Afterlife Memory Trust.” With us, you will be selecting three pieces of your memory to relive by the time you decease. When your life terminates, we will stimulate your neurons to bring out the designated memories. Each vision lasts a light time.

In Afterimage for Tomorrow, director Singing Chen collaborates with choreographer Shu-Yi Chou to perform the ineffable in memories. This metafiction film is set in a futuristic world, where memories can be uploaded and perpetuated, thus leading to the discussion of what in life is worth storing.

ALone
Cheng Yi-Ting
Taiwan / 2021 / 6’24”

In a space isolated from the rest of the world, without the existence of others as an anchoring point, can one’s life still be construed the same as it used to be?

Starting from the situation of “being isolated,” this work is aimed to reproduce a certain sense of stagnation of space and time, of repetition, and of inescapable fate. By delivering an immersive visual experience with a VR device, along with a synchronized installation as well as a narrative that blends images and tactile senses, this work offers a media experience that channels in an otherworldly dimension of time and space.

Canaria
Yuhara Kazuki
Japan / 2020 / 4’19”

★ 24th Japan Media Arts Festival Entertainment Division New Face Award
★ Asia Digital Art Award FUKUOKA Entertainment Division Best Award

An old canary, yearning for the sun, flies into space.

Burned by the sun’s flames and revived, Canaria sang a song of regeneration.

Diagnosia
Zhang Mengtai
USA / 2021 / 30’

★ 2022 Sundance Film Festival New Frontier
★ 2021 IDFA DocLab Competition For Immersive Non-Fiction

Exploring the potential of VR as a tool for transplanting secondhand memories, Diagnosia aims to connect the audience to social issues via a sensorial immersion and embodiment in the memories of people who experienced them firsthand. Diagnosia portrays Mengtai’s memories of being incarcerated in a military-operated Internet addiction camp in Beijing in 2007, where internet addiction and other youth issues were treated as a severe mental disorder with sometimes violent means.

The Sun Ladies
Celine Tricart
USA / 2018 / 7’

★ 2018 World VR Forum Best VR Documentary
★ 2018 Sundance Film Festival Official Selection
★ 2018 SXSW Film Festival Official Selection

The Sun Ladies VR takes the viewer on an intimate journey to the lives of a group of Yazidi women fighting ISIS in Iraq. Narrated from the point of view of Xate Shingali, the captain of the Sun Ladies troop, the VR experience follows the dramatic changes in her life. Spanning from her career as a known singer in Kurdistan to the invasion of ISIS soldiers in her Yazidi community of Sinjar, who killed the men and took the women as sex slaves, and the decision to form this women army to protect and free their sisters.

The Key
Celine Tricart
USA / 2019 / 17’

★ 2019 Tribeca Film Festival Storyscapes Award
★ 2019 Venice Film Festival Grand Jury Prize for Best VR

The Key is an interactive experience mixing immersive theater and virtual reality. It has a strong narrative structure punctuated by moments of interactivity. The participant goes on a journey exploring dreams, facing challenges and difficult decisions throughout. The participant will experience a metaphorical journey from danger to safety. Through this journey a hidden truth is uncovered, and a new beauty revealed.

Komez Alef O
Ioulia Isserlis
Germany / 2022 / 18’

★ 2022 SXSW Film Festival World premiere
★ 2022 Raindance Film Festival Nominated for Best Immersive Experience for Social Impact
★ 2022 nextReality.Contest Zeitgeist Award

The Holocaust survivor Victor I. takes the viewer on a deeply personal VR journey through his memories of the Second World War: The trauma of the Holocaust, the trauma of war and the trauma of being forcefully uprooted from home. The experience is guided by audio recordings of Victor’s testimonies and supported by stylized visualizations of his memories that are both re-created through his recollections and reimagined through his daughter who grew up with and inherited his memories.

Grimm’s Moon
Mick Yip
Hong Kong / 2021 / 5’

The moon sinks and the clock reverses. Is God rehearsing a drama of mismatching?

He was a watchmaker. When his girlfriend left and the moon experiment began, the world became a different place. His optic nerves were entangled, leading to inverted vision.

He refused to participate in such a rehearsal. He had convinced himself to remain rational amid this reversal, striving to turn the tide. So in the midst of the madness, he came to a conclusion. “It’s all the moon’s fault.”

Kowloon Forest
Alexey Marfin
USA, Hong Kong / 2019 / 8’

★ 2020 Vancouver Film Festival Winner: Best Live-Action VR Film
★ 2019 Busan Film Festival

A journey through the private lives of five strangers in Hong Kong. A VR film about finding intimacy in a city of density.

Silili & Tree
Polly Yeung
Hong Kong / 2022 / 13’

★ Hong Kong ICT Awards Digital Entertainment (Interaction Design) Silver Award

A mysterious island hovers in the sky. There grows the magical tree. We come to encounter Master Silili, who will guide us through the wonderful soul-searching journey. In the face of natural beauty one will fully immerse into this surrounding and be open to the wisdom taught by the Mother Nature.

Speak to Awaken Ep.1 Diving into Siraya
Lai Kuan-Yuan
Taiwan, Germany / 2020 / 17’

★ 2020 Kaohsiung Film Festival
★ 2021 Bucheon International Film Festival Beyond Reality XR

It is an abstract journey about the Sirayan aboriginal language in Taiwan that has been undergoing attempts at revitalization. Travel along a visualized road of language, experience the journey by listening and watching, and trigger interactions with your voice. Language learning is encouraged through an experimental immersive experience that is more comparable to early childhood learning than annotated, classroom methods.

Speak to Awaken Ep.2 Kusunda
Gayatri Parameswaran, Felix Gaedtke
Germany, Taiwan / 2020 / 22’

★ 2021 Tribeca Film Festival Storyscapes Award
★ 2021 Bucheon International Film Festival Beyond Reality XR
★ 2020 Kaohsiung Film Festival

You are invited to learn and speak some words in the Kusunda language while carving your narrative experience and showing solidarity towards the community. Every two weeks a language falls asleep. Most languages in danger belong to indigenous communities such as Kusunda in Nepal. The Kusunda language has been categorised by linguists as a language isolate, meaning it is unrelated to any other language family of the world. Currently there are only about 150 people in Nepal who are identified as Kusunda.

Vajont
Iolanda Di Bonaventura
Italy / 2020 / 25-45’

★ 2020 Venice Film Festival

Vajont is an interactive first-person VR experience set in the Italian valley of the same name. The story takes place a few hours before a disaster – one of the greatest Italian tragedies since the end of the Second World War. On October 9th, 1963, a landslide slipped into an artificial lake and generated a devastating wave, almost completely destroying the nearby villages. The experience focuses on a dialogue between a husband and his wife. The woman senses the risk and wants to leave, the husband who refuses any idea of danger. What is preventing us from leaving the places that we feel we belong to? The participant’s choices will influence the couple’s future.

My Syrian Neighbors
Wu Po-Hung
Taiwan / 2019 / 7’

★ 2019 Kaohsiung Film Festival

July, a Syrian young girl who moved to Turkey with her family few years ago. They had a difficult time until they met a Taiwanese mother, who became their neighbor and built friendship with them. After the Taiwanese family got back to Taiwan, they realized the real meaning of “neighbors”.

Where is Noddy
Hsu Chih-Yen
Taiwan / 2022 / 17’

★ 2022 Kaohsiung Film Festival

A boy named Noddy, who likes to play games very much. His favorite is hide and seek because everyone likes it. But Noddy is always the first one to get caught. Every time he gets caught, he puts up a long face.

One day, he finds the safest place and hides inside quietly and patiently without making any noise. He sees other kids getting caught one by one. Noddy finally succeeds; no one can find him.