Virtual Reality

CONTAINER makes visible the 'invisiblized' bodies enabling our consumer society. Confronting slavery through an ever transforming shipping container, the past becomes the present, the invisible become visible. We witness the shards of society: the ghosts of the past and living spectres of the modern world.

A visually arresting interactive exploration of a space that represents the recesses of the mind and soul, lost in the dips of depressive and anxious states. The autobiographical narrative is a composition of fragments of stories and descriptions of inner turmoil, drawing the audience into an elaborate world of sometimes illustrative, sometimes metaphorical animations and ingenious sound design to understand the causes and experience of depression, the struggle to break out of its darkness, and the feelings of futility and heaviness. Open, almost diaristically intimate notes navigate the journey through rooms, floors and different environments that embody the manifestations of inner heaviness.

Encircling a central square, a new town emerges in all its diversity. A crossroad of stories, buildings, hopes, and conflicts. Social ties and cultures take root. People nurture sympathy and care for their equals, but also animosity towards those who are different. It doesn't take long for an “us versus them” atmosphere to take over. From the Main Square is an interactive VR experience that invites the viewer to witness the rise and fall of a divided society. A civilization blossoms, with all its contradictions, only to become a danger to itself.

Missing Pictures is a 5-part documentary that gives directors a chance to tell the story that would otherwise never be told. Tsai Ming-Liang, the Taiwanese maestro of slow cinema, doesn’t have a real “missing picture”, but what he does have are childhood memories, so vivid that it is impossible for him to film. The filmmaker seizes the medium of virtual reality to go back to the Malaysia of his childhood, when his grandparents took him to see two movies every night. Rather than telling us about an unmade film, Tsai Ming-Liang transforms the exercise into a making-of of his entire film career.

One of the central problems of the reintroduction is the animals’ wanderlust. Since the flight path to suitable wintering grounds is not instinctive but learned from older, more experienced animals, young birds raised by humans are not familiar with it. Although they fly from their dwelling places in August, they do not do so together or in the same direction. As part of a resettlement project at Vienna’s Schönbrunn Zoo, the young birds are cared for around the clock by human foster parents, with whom they build up the bond needed to learn the long journey across the Alps.

On January 13th, 2018, an alert was issued to every citizen of Hawaiʻi: BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. Hawaiians suddenly confronted a real and urgent nuclear threat—one that we all currently face, but rarely acknowledge. As Kauai resident Cynthia Lazaroff would later say, “The alert was false, but the nuclear threat is real, …we experienced it personally, felt the terror.“ Although nothing happened that day, everything changed.

It was while filming The Enemy in Congo, his previous VR project, that Karim Ben Khelifa came up with the idea for Seven Grams. In this project he wishes to provoke real awareness of the misdeeds inherent in the mineral trade in the DRC. Seven Grams aims to bring the DRC’s tragedy straight to the smartphone that its mineral resources helped make. Through AR sequences, and an animated film, Seven Grams offers an entirely new way for people to understand the human cost that went into producing their smartphones.

It's March 21, 1945. You’re a young navigator in the Royal Air Force. You’re flying in formation all headed for the same target: the Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen. But in the critical minutes leading up to the planned attack, a sudden explosion wreaks havoc and disorients you. Should you drop the bombs? And where should you drop them? Shadow is a realistic VR-experience based on the British air raid against the Shellhouse in Copenhagen, during which a calamity led to the accidental bombing of Institut Jeanne d’Arc. Shadow simulates the tragic event seen through the eyes of a young RAF-navigator.

SORELLA'S STORY explores the story behind a single atrocity photography of a group of women and 11-year-old Sorella, during the Holocaust. Buried by history, the 360° film brings to life a smuggled photograph, taken in December 1941, showing Latvian Jewish women and an 11-year old girl Sorella Epstein, being ordered to undress in freezing temperatures prior to mass execution in Liepaja, Latvia.

Upon being shown a photograph of a 6-year old boy, now digitally aged to 50, Yathay Pin’s realities collide. Haunted by his inner demons, his guilt surfaces for abandoning his son to escape during the Cambodian genocide. The Player, embodying Yathay, plummets into his mental prison, containing locked memories. As they experience Yathay’s journey, they discover his reason for living: to reclaim all that he lost and to reunite with his son. Therefore, finding his salvation and healing his heart.

where… is a science fiction short film, a poetic retrospective from a seemingly post-catastrophic, near future with flashbacks to our current present. The questions after origin and aim accompany the protagonist in different environments and periods of time. A rambling through parallel worlds – through memories? Multi-layered images become an inventory that exposes possible variants of history. Where… is a poetic immersive photo film. It’s a contemplation on the inner cinema and your own fragile memories.