The Tribeca Film Festival unveils Tribeca Cinema360, featuring four curated screening programs of 360° mobile content in a VR theater.
Entering the VR theater at the Tribeca Film Festival in lower Manhattan feels a bit like stepping into David Lynch’s subconscious. Deep red curtains line the perimeter of a dimly lit room, curvy white swivel chairs are spaced equidistant from each other. If VR is the future of filmed content, the undiscovered country, then this is an ideal design for the screening room.
This year, the Tribeca Film Festival Immersive program welcomes the Cinema360 experience to their lineup. Cinema360 features four immersive screening programs: the breathtaking experimental visions of Horizons, VR for Good Creators Lab, This is Climate Change, and the horror-themed It’s Right Behind You. Each program spotlights several short films from countries including Sweden, China, The Netherlands, India, Spain, South Korea, and the United States.
Once you put on the goggles and headphones, you’re transported. I found this feeling of total immersion to be most successful when the filmmakers would utilize static or steadily moving shots. This allowed the viewer to take control of what the were seeing and therefore control and curate the story itself. You feel like you’re a fly on the wall, an intruder, that you’ll be spotted eavesdropping at any moment and will have to make up an excuse for why you’ve been staring at a couple contemplating the end of the world.
In the film 02:09 by Svante Fjaestad, this couple stands on a rooftop, gazing ahead. Their casual conversation seems bigger than the fireballs shooting up to the sky. You can choose to ignore their conversation altogether, swivel 180 degrees, and watch a candle burning quietly in the corner of this warehouse rooftop. Or you can look up at the angry clouds swirling in the night sky, reflecting the pink and purple lights from what’s left of the city below.
Prolific filmmaker and Palme d’Or winner Terrence Malick’s film Together expertly wields the viewers’ power to choose as two men try to find each other. They dance to the edges of your periphery, toying with physical limits. You cannot watch both men at once until they circle back, finally connect, and fade into a galaxy of innumerable stars.
One of the unexpected perks of VR is that no one can see or hear you ugly cry and suddenly yelp during a heartbreaking short like The Last Chair, a Dutch documentary about an elderly farmer named Egbert, the last surviving member of his family, as he escorts the viewer through his daily routine. With the thick goggles strapped to my face and giant headphones boxing my ears, I could let my tears fall confidently down my cheeks as I sat across from this man at his humble kitchen table and watched him butter his toast. Occasionally he’d look up and meet my eyes and I felt compelled to reach out and grab his hand, to savor the moment.
Conversely, after sitting through nearly three hours of VR shorts with few short breaks between programs, one of the pitfalls of VR is that its lack of a singular focal point and total immersion can elicit feelings of nausea. I was very grateful when a program coordinator offered us water halfway through. Although queasiness definitely worked in favor of the horror shorts.
The horror genre has infinite potential in this developing medium. All three shorts were solid with moments of pure creative genius found in the way the filmmakers shifted and warped the viewer’s point of view. My favorite horror short overall was An Obituary by Jean Yoon, Kuk-Seok Yang, and Jin-hee Kim. A man receives a message that his best friend has died and travels to the mother’s house deep in the woods for the funeral. When he goes to leave, his friend’s mother becomes possessed and leaps high into the air, chasing after him. You absorb his paranoia as he runs haphazardly through the woods, finds his car, and drives through thick fog with the viewer in the passenger’s seat.
Leaving this Lynchian dreamscape and stepping out onto Canal Street was a hard transition. I consider myself to be skilled at navigating the New York City sidewalks, intuiting the fastest and most efficient routes through the throngs of people, but I found myself bumping into pedestrians as I stared all around this street I’ve walked down so many times. The gift of immersing myself in a new perspective and a new reality let me see my own with fresh eyes.