Venice Immersive 2025: my favorite projects in competition -

Post-festival reflections on the 2025 edition of Venice Immersive at the Venice Film Festival and on my 5 favorite works

It’s been ten years now that I’ve been attending Venice Immersive at the Venice Film Festival. I was there when Jesus performed his first miracle in virtual reality, when Venice Immersive was still called Venice VR, when works involved (several) live actors and played with all your senses — including smell. Hardly a distribution-friendly approach, but one that managed to make audiences dream, even the most skeptical ones.

For a while now, I’ve been discussing this progressive shift of “VR” at Venice with a close friend who, after years of faithful presence at the event, refused to attend this year. “It’s not like it used to be,” she often tells me. And while distribution and marketing needs inevitably push the field in certain directions—not wrong in themselves, and in fact more accessible, as I always remind her — it’s undeniable that we all miss the radical experimentation that accompanied some of the best immersive experiences I’ve seen in Venice over this past decade.

Venice Immersive 2025: “what d'you recommend?”

This year I broke my personal viewing record: 40 experiences between competition and out of competition, plus a few worlds on VRChat (though I plan to catch up on more from home).

Overall, it was a strong edition with solid quality, featuring some real highlights… and a few low points that shouldn’t be overlooked.

Before arriving at the Lido, you usually have a vague idea of what might appeal to you, if you know the immersive field a bit. But when it comes to booking works, it’s often done blind: you rely on project durations (if it’s over 40 minutes, I’m already judging you a little), on what you know about the creators, and, perhaps most often, on which time slots happen to be free in your calendar (Note for the Biennale: how nice would it be if the time-slot calendar were published in advance, so we could book things with a clear schedule in mind instead of constantly improvising.)

But it only takes two days, maybe less, at Venice Immersive to figure out what’s really worth booking next. That’s because, right away, the most common question exchanged at the Lazzaretto Vecchio is some variation of “What have you seen so far? What did you like most? What should I try?” And the cloud of answers almost always clusters around four or five main experiences.

This year, the number one answer was without a doubt Blur, immediately followed by Clouds Are 2000 Meters Up.

And when people asked me, those were exactly the two titles I most often gave.

The most beautiful immersive experiences of Venice 82 (In Competition)

The pictures you see show me betting on which experiences would win at this year’s festival. I guessed two out of three. Not a bad result, you could say (proud Agnese moment here) — except for the fact that the one I was 100% sure of, Blur, didn’t actually take home the (well-deserved, at least in my view) award.

Blur wasn’t the only experience I loved, but it was certainly the one that stood out the most. But let’s take things in order… and go through what, for my taste, were the five best experiences in competition at this Venice Immersive 2025, starting from the 5th place.

5. Collective Body by Sarah Silverblatt-Buser

Collective Body is an interactive, virtual reality experience that invites us to meet ourselves and each other through movement. Set in the middle of a New Mexican storm, participants are guided to rediscover their first ways of engaging with the world, symbolising formative life events that culminate in a shared exploration of our embodied selves. These key moments — beginning alone, discovering the unfamiliar, first encounters, and joyfully moving together — represent how our personal and collective stories are written through movement.
Fonte: Biennale Cinema

Dancing in a starry world in virtual reality. The moment I say “dancing,” many people already want to run for the hills. But the truth is that in VR it’s much easier to let yourself go with the movement… at least until you remember that while you’re there, headset on, dancing away without a care in the world, there are at least two or three members of the staff or creative team standing in front of you, watching every move.

In VR, you either play along and stop caring, or you’ll always end up feeling just a little awkward.

If this sense of embarrassment often follows me into the video games presented in Venice—where I’m constantly afraid of messing up—I’m lucky to be less aware of it in more intimate works. And that’s exactly how it was with Collective Body. True, at first a piece like this can feel intimidating, but perhaps that’s also why I love this kind of experience, and why I loved this one in particular.

Because if the work is done well, there’s always a moment when everything else fades away and all that’s left is you, your body, the music, and indistinct figures around you that you know are your fellow participants… and suddenly the virtual world becomes the only world, while everything else seems to pause.

I saw it happen in The Garden Says, one of my all-time favorite immersive works, and in different ways I felt it again in Collective Body.

In the end, I think the reason this piece became one of my favorites is actually very human and very little about technology. In Collective Body, our avatars take shape as elemental silhouettes: made of smoke, or dust, or fire, or clouds… Each participant assumes a form based on how they move and dance in space. In other words, the piece strips away the usual aesthetic references we rely on to judge what surrounds us, and instead brings out, in a different way, the deeper essence of each individual.

I haven’t yet had the chance to ask the creators what exactly in our movements generated a given identity. But as for me—my form was air. And for those brief moments, I truly became it.

4. Creation of the Worlds by Kristina Buozyte, Vitalijus Zukas

Creation of the Worlds is a VR experience inspired by the visionary art and music of Lithuania’s most renowned artist, Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis. This poetic VR odyssey is both a meditation on creation and a metaphor for the human journey toward inner maturity. Created by Kristina Buožytė and Vitalijus Žukas, the experience blends immersive storytelling with interactive elements, inviting viewers into a dreamlike world. With the freedom to navigate and soar through evolving environments, the viewer gradually discovers they are not merely an observer — but the creator and caretaker of timeless worlds. Inspired by over sixty of Čiurlionis’s paintings, the experience blends visual art with a contemporary reimagining of Čiurlionis’s music by Phil Von and Rokas Zubovas.
Fonte: Biennale Cinema

Kristina Buozyte and Vitalijus Zukas had already been in Venice back in 2018 with Angelų Takais (Trail of Angels), a work inspired by the art of the renowned Lithuanian artist Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis. This year, they returned with another piece based on his paintings and music, titled Creation of the Worlds.

The pairing of art and immersive technology is nothing new, and it’s often highly effective in carrying audiences into an artist’s vision. No wonder the work I loved most at last year’s Festival focused on the art of another great painter, Algis Kriščiūnas — and once again, it was a Lithuanian team behind it.

In a field where immersive productions often lean toward a dramatic mood — sometimes offering very sad experience, other times concentrating on protest-driven pieces — a work like Creation of the Worlds feels like a genuine breath of fresh air and a respectful approach to a spirituality we often neglect.

Drawing on the fantastical and deeply spiritual vision of Čiurlionis, whose paintings turn into the worlds we find ourselves flying over in virtual reality, Kristina Buozyte and Vitalijus Zukas offer us what they themselves describe as a “transcendental” journey through the beauty of life and existence.

They do so not just to help us escape from the harshness of daily life, but to remind us of the “beyond”… that poetic dimension that is always present in our existence.

Scenes like the flight over the city or the rising sea covering everything are so intense — both visually and emotionally — that they can move the most sensitive among us (read: me, for sure), offering a moment of respite that, especially during such packed and fast-paced events as a festival, is truly needed.

3. Less than 5gr of Saffron by Négar Motevalymeidanshah

Golnaz is a young Iranian immigrant trying to adjust to her new life in Germany. One evening, returning from her job (as an assistant at a migrant reception centre in the Berlin suburbs), she is starving, and her refrigerator is empty. She decides to go to the nearest supermarket. The supermarket has just received a new product: saffron. Even though it is very expensive for her, she cannot resist: she buys a packet of saffron. Emotions overwhelm her. She feels the need to cook a home-cooked meal to help her overcome her homesickness. She prepares rice and adds saffron, a comfort food from her past. But she never expected that this moment would plunge her back into the most traumatic events of her life. Most notably, three years ago, she survived a tragic drowning that took her family while traveling illegally by boat.
Fonte: Biennale Cinema

This year, the jury and I played on the same team.

Remember back in high school when they told you about Proust’s madeleine, and how its smell and taste could instantly summon the most vivid memories of the past? Less than 5gr of Saffron starts from that very idea, and in just seven minutes achieves what much more complex productions—ten times as long (yes, including films)—have often failed to do.

Négar Motevalymeidanshah’s piece is a narrative and visual masterpiece that deserves to be shown to the entire world, especially to those who speak endlessly about migration without ever truly grasping what it means for those who experience its hardships firsthand. By linking this theme to everyday life and to an action familiar to all of us, the work situates itself in a space that feels intuitively accessible and familiar — therefore even more dramatic.

Through the use of red and an alternation of beautiful and terrible memories, Less than 5gr of Saffron conveys its story with such visceral power that the warning given in the opening credits is genuinely warranted. Yet unlike other, more superficial works, it does not aim to shock; it is simply, profoundly human. And while it would have been effective even as a short animated film, the use of immersive media makes the memories, pain, and tears enter you with the immediacy of a storm. Magnificent.

2. Blur by Craig Quintero and Phoebe Greenberg

And here we are at the much-discussed project with which we opened this article. Loved by audiences, not appreciated enough by the jury (or at least by part of it), Blur would deserve an article of its own.

But let me start with a small preface. Over the past four years at the Festival, I’ve had the chance to get closely acquainted with the work of Craig Quintero, artistic director of the Riverbed Theatre Company in Taipei.

Craig Quintero, I believe, can now rightly be considered the King of 360. A technique I usually don’t enjoy becomes, in his hands, something magical. Dreamlike, unsettling, delicately obsessive — his images close in on you and make you doubt what is real and what is fiction: a true mind-bender.

As for Blur, the first thing to mention is that his hand in the project is unmistakable, giving the work a clear and distinctive identity. That said, with this new piece we step into a universe that is also completely different: a universe of theater, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, animation, deception, and more.

“There’s a bit of everything in it,” many of us said, and it’s certainly true. But maybe because of this, what Blur offers is a hunger for experimentation, at the crossroads of languages and possibilities — something I hadn’t seen at the Lazzaretto Vecchio in a long time.

The story reflects on cloning, and it’s striking how in a narrative so visually “absurd,” you can still follow the theme and grasp its implications.

Right from the start, “something feels off”: there are four of us, seated in a room, headsets in hand, four walls enclosing us. Yet the physical walls around us literally vanish the moment we put the headset on and are asked to walk through them. And yes — you can. You don’t bump into anything. It’s the first moment when you start doubting your real eyes and begin to believe you’ve stepped into a dream.

From there it’s a stream of visions, culminating in two moments I personally loved… the walk through the “suicide forest” and the encounter with yourself.

I won’t say more, because so much of the meaning of the piece lies in that discovery… but know this: if I could personally fund the distribution of this work in Italy, I would. It simply has to be seen.

1. The Clouds Are Two Thousand Meters Up by Singing Chen

After the sudden death of his wife, Guan discovers her unfinished novel — a tale intertwining the endangered clouded leopard and the Rukai tribe’s sacred origin myth, which tells of their descent from the elusive animal. Grief-stricken and seeking connection, he sets out on a surreal journey into dreamlike scenes — a maze of the subconscious, mistshrouded forests, ancient tree hollows and symbolic inner landscapes. Adapted from a short story by acclaimed Taiwanese author Wu Ming-Yi, The Clouds Are Two Thousand Meters Up is a single-user, free-roaming VR experience that blends literature and memory into an intimate exploration of love, loss and self-reflection.
Fonte: Biennale Cinema

The Clouds Are Two Thousand Meters Up was one of the most anticipated works of this festival. Its creator, Singing Chen, had already taken home one of the immersive section’s awards in 2022 with her previous work, The Man Who Couldn’t Leave — a 360 piece that was absolutely stunning, with immense human and social impact.

The director of the site I write for, XRMust, immediately set his sights on this project, and I followed suit — especially after learning it was an installation-based work, housed in a large room at Venice Immersive, clearly inviting participants to interact with the story in some way (which I personally love).

And yet, despite the high expectations, nothing could have prepared me for what I experienced. Based on a story by Wu Ming-Yi, The Clouds Are Two Thousand Meters Up manages to stage the poetry and emotional intensity of a narrative with universal resonance, yet deeply rooted in its culture.

It does so by making superb use of today’s immersive technologies, starting with the much-hyped Gaussian Splatting.

The result is nothing short of magic. We follow a man, Guan, searching for his tragically lost wife, starting from the simplicity of his home — recreated almost like a vast diorama — and moving into the immensity of a fog-wrapped Taiwanese forest, where legend says the answer he seeks can be found.

It’s a human journey, but also a physical one, as we literally walk through the labyrinths of Guan’s mind and, alongside him, into places our eyes have never seen before — places that seem drawn straight out of our dreams. The wind (yes, actual wind… and in future versions, scents as well) is just one of the elements the artists use to immerse you in the story, completing an experience of immense beauty that moved me so deeply I received a consoling hug from the team when I removed the headset (along with some excellent Taiwanese pineapple cakes).

No surprise, then, that The Clouds Are Two Thousand Meters Up won the main award at Venice Immersive — and as for me, I’m already considering a trip to Taiwan to experience the work again in its future iterations.

I’ll close here this long reflection on Venice Immersive 2025 and on my five favorite works from this year’s competition.

For the record, here are also the five pieces I loved most out of competition, in order:

Ancestors by Steye Hallema
D-Day: The Camera Soldier by Chloé Rochereuil for Targo
Happy Shadow by Pei-Ying and Ting-Ruei Su
Mnemosyne by Wuer
Lili by Navid Khonsari and Vassiliki Khonsari

Now we can only wait for Venice Immersive 2026. The Biennale Cinema will return on Wednesday, September 2, and stay with us until Saturday, September 12. Get your accreditation requests ready, folks.