The American Express-sponsored BFI London Film Festival has announced the lineup for the third LFF Expanded, the festival’s immersive art and extended realities strand, which runs from 5 to 16 October.
This year’s programme will take place across multiple venues on the South Bank and include interactive virtual reality, screen-based installations, augmented reality, mixed reality, immersive audio experience and live performance content. 20 projects from 17 countries (Canada, China, Czechia, France, Germany, India, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, UK, Ukraine and USA) will feature, including 12 from the UK (this includes co-productions)
One of the highlights is going to be Guy Maddin’s Haunted Hotel.. This immersive collage will feature clippings from the Director’s personal archive and a soundscape by Magnus Fiennes that, for Ulrich Schrauth, BFI London Film Festival’s immersive art and XR curator, “invites audiences to explore a vibrant tableau of desire, deception and death”.
“I’ve long told myself that collage-making is good for keeping my eye sharp for film shoots. After all, the snipper and gluer of papery things arranges those things in a frame, just like a director — pure mise-en-scène! But making collages in augmented reality truly is a brain-breaker, another experience completely, with its multiple layers of interest aspiring to draw the viewer ever inward, free-floating non-sequiturs that suggest causal connections and conceal vile secrets, the whole creating an atmosphere thick with uninhibited urges — lustful, homicidal, stupid! In short, collage-making in AR simply is filmmaking, and I’m so delighted to have worked with the BFI London Film Festival to bring this new work to life.”
Guy Maddin
‘In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats’, a multi-sensory, interactive virtual reality experience by award-winning filmmaker Darren Emerson, will transport its audiences to the height of the Acid House movement. VR documentary ‘On the Morning You Wake (to the End of the World)’ mixes storytelling and virtual production techniques “to recreate the lived experiences of the people of Hawai’i, who were forced to make impossible decisions in the face of impending nuclear violence.”
‘Intravene’, which will be housed inside a shipping container on Theatre Square in front of the National Theatre, “uses binaural 360 degree sound to plunge listeners into the heart of the overdose crisis in Vancouver, giving voice to the people most affected by it: users and frontline workers”.
Owners of Oculus headsets will be able to watch selected works for free rom 5 to 23 October.
Guy Maddin’s Haunted Hotel will also remain at BFI Southbank until 30 October 2022, accompanied by special screenings of three of his best-loved works in late October.
The 66th BFI London Film Festival in partnership with American Express takes place from Wednesday 5 October to Sunday 16 October, 2022. Full details of LFF Expanded and the LFFprogramme will be online after the programme launch on Thursday 1 September 2022.
Source: BFI