Venice Immersive 2025 awards 'The Clouds Are 2000 Meters Up,' 'A Long Goodbye,' and 'Less Than 5 Gr of Saffron,' cementing its role as XR’s top showcase.
Singing Chen acknowledges receiving the Venice Immersive Best Experience Award for 'The clouds are two thousand meters up" during the award ceremony of the 82nd Venice Film Festival on September 6, 2025 at Venice Lido.
Venice Immersive is the only major festival program that treats XR on equal footing with film, and its prizes carry symbolic weight. Since its launch in 2017, it has become the premier showcase for virtual and mixed reality, staged on Lazzaretto Vecchio, a small island that once served as a plague quarantine station. This year’s competition featured thirty projects. The festival presents 69 extended-reality projects from 27 countries, including immersive videos, virtual worlds, and installations. 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., directed by Singing Chen, which won the Venice Immersive Grand Prize is single-user, free-roaming VR experience adapts a short story by celebrated Taiwanese author Wu Ming-Yi, guiding users through dreamlike forests and symbolic inner landscapes as a grief-stricken widower seeks a connection to his late wife’s spirit. Live-action videogrammertry is used to dramatic effect as the action plays out in front of us. A Long Goodbye tells the story of Ida, a 72-year-old pianist living with dementia. In this animated, interactive VR experience, we walk in Ida’s shoes.VENICE, ITALY - SEPTEMBER 06: Victor Maes and Kate Voet pose with the Venice Immersive Achievement Prize for “A Long Goodbye” during the winners photocall at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival on September 06, 2025 in Venice, Italy. is a 35-minute animated, interactive VR installation by Kate Voet and Victor Maes, featured in competition in the Venice Immersive section at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival. The experience puts the viewer in the shoes of Ida, a 72-year-old pianist with dementia, revisiting her memories through a gently animated apartment and fragments of her past, such as tape recordings of her husband, Daniel. This tactile, poetic journey explores memory, connection, and love amid the erosion of identity, rendered in a hand-drawn, painterly aesthetic. Less than 5 Gr of Saffron tackles a subject we think we’ve already seen too much of: the often tragic circumstances under which many migrants flee their home countries in search of a better future.directed by Négar Motevalymeidanshah , is a 7-minute VR experience with no dialogue. It follows Golnaz, a young Iranian immigrant working at a migrant reception center in suburban Berlin. One evening, hungry and facing an empty fridge, she splurges on expensive saffron in a supermarket. Cooking saffron-infused rice, she seeks comfort from her homesickness—but this sensory act unexpectedly unravels traumatic memories of a family tragedy: a ship-drowning that claimed her loved ones three years earlier. The piece humanizes migrant suffering by centering empathy through an intimate, familiar momentIranian director Negar Motevalymeidanshah acknowledges receiving the Venice Immersive Special Jury Prize for "Less tha 5gr of Saffron" during the award ceremony of the 82nd Venice Film Festival on September 6, 2025 at Venice Lido. Of course, the beauty of a festival like Venice is much broader than a mere competition. Venice Immersive brings together the very best of non-game content. Venice Immersive brings together the creator community and host a marketplace where producers can collaborate and find funding. It is impossible, even over the fifteen days of the festival, to see everything. I saw almost twenty experience in my four days there. It was a bell shaped curve, with a handful of truly great works of art. In addition to the winners then, I’ll share some of the experience that stood out for me in a world where I saw less than a third of what this amazing festival had to offer.directed by Craig Quintero of Taipei’s Riverbed Theatre and Phoebe Greenberg of Montreal’s PHI Centre, combines live performance with free-roam VR in a surreal meditation on grief, cloning, and the ethics of science. Only about 300 people were able to experience it during the festival, intensifying its mystique. Participants begin with live actors in red dresses, then transition into VR where ghostly avatars, fragmented scenes of loss, and an uncanny doppelgänger encounter unfold.left audiences stunned and speechless, a hybrid of theater and XR that lingers as memory more than story.was the experience that built the most buzz among attendees, but the magic didn’t extend to the judges. Doug Liman new sci-fi film feels like a Hollywood blockbuster made for the new AndroidXR powered Samsung Mixed Reality headset.at the Venice Film Festival, a twelve-minute immersive thriller built for Google’s new AndroidXR platform and Samsung’s upcoming MR headset. Produced with longtime collaborators Juliana Tatlock and Jed Weintraub at 30 Ninjas, the project uses Google’s human-scanning technology and Unreal Engine to deliver a claustrophobic sci-fi drama. The story follows five unqualified astronauts chasing wealth on a planet made of diamonds and gold, with greed and conflicting testimonies driving the tension. Hailee Steinfeld, Freida Pinto, DK Metcalf, and Ron Perlman star. An AI-driven extension powered by Gemini lets audiences interact with Metcalf’s character beyond the film. I was likewise fascinated by everything about this Google - Hollywood collaboration and wrote a whole story on it. The experience blends 3D video, immersive video, and rendered scenes to tell the story of combat cameraman Richard Taylor, who captured some of the most iconic footage of D-Day during the initial invasion.is a 20-minute spatial documentary made for the Apple Vision Pro, was produced by Targo with Time Studios. Released May 27, 2025, it follows combat cameraman Richard Taylor, whose footage defined the invasion, through the perspective of his daughter as she retraces his steps on Omaha Beach. Archival film appears inside a camera housing, and recreated battle moments use AI colorization and 3D modeling., debuts exclusively on the Apple Vision Pro, placing viewers inside a WWII submarine under attack. Director Edward Berger designed the experience to evoke visceral tension: rain droplets, torpedo corridors, and claustrophobic realism blur the line between viewer and scene. The 180° field of view allows you to inspect rivets and condensation, yet remains bounded, fading to black at the edges. It's a compelling, technologically impressive drama. Shellz and Yosi we our docents in VR Chat who guided us into enviornments to experience two concerts in VR, one danced based, and one hard driving rock,FZMZ, a five-member avatar band known for merging music, anime, gaming, and VR, is restaging its spectacular debut VR concert “DEEP:DAWN.” Originally staged in VRChat to an audience of over 15,000 attendees, the immersive show was revived to celebrate its selection in the Best of Worlds XR section at the 2025 Venice International Film Festival.that follows a friendship born in VRChat between Hiyu, a Stockholm-based VR creator with kidney failure, and Photographotter, an online friend from the VR Chat “Furry” community who travels from New York to Sweden to donate his kidney, an act of unfathomable generosity. Directed by Joe Hunting and produced with Max Willson, the film bridges virtual and real realms, blending their virtual and physical avatars and physical footage as we to highlight the depth of their bond. Rooted in the VR furry community and premiered at festivals like Sundance, it’s a powerful testament to connection, empathy, and how online relationships can transform lives. For theshowing at Venice Immersive, we watch it inside of VR in an existing furry tree house theater that also appears in the film.Jeonyeok 8si wa goyangi is a 14-minute generative VR experience by director Minhyuk Che in competition at the 2025 Venice Immersive section. The story centers on Haru, a cartoonist grappling with grief after losing their partner Mina in the Itaewon tragedy. Each evening at 8 pm—the hour Mina used to return—Haru relives that moment in looping form, entering different “emotional rooms.” The VR piece uses real-time generative imagery and AI-driven monologues to externalize their mourning through drawing and voiced reflection, creating an intimate meditation on memory and absence.is hailed as “the world’s first post-cinematic choreographic installation,” showcased on a panoramic, 360-degree stereoscopic nVis screen, a 12K LED cylinder spanning eight meters wide and four high, delivering a 26-million-pixel immersive visual field. Created with artists Ravi Deepres and Theresa Baumgartner, it fuses dance, digital imaging, AI, choreography, and spatialized sound. The installation dissolves the fourth wall, bringing viewers into the heart of the performance with hyperreal dancers from Company Wayne McGregor and the Hong Kong Ballet in a unique soundscape by Invisible Mountain. Up to 20 people experience each viewing, which is always distinct. Honestly, being asked to stand without my smartphone in the dark for 57 minutes was a lot but then, maybe that was intentional. It’s a poem that dares you to throw it away. "Reflections of Little Red Dot" is a mixed reality open documentary that allows viewers to explore the rapidly developing landscape of Singapore through personal stories from Singaporeans young and old alike.are three extraordinary experiences I saw at SXSW in March that were among the best experiences on the Island.
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
9 Standout Releases From the 2025 Venice Film FestivalFrom “The Voice of Hind Rajab“ and “No Other Choice” to “Frankenstein” and “The Testament of Ann Lee,” these are the nine best films from the Venice Film Festival 2025.
Read more »
The Top Fashion Moments From the 2025 Venice Film Festival You Might Have MissedFrom quiet designer debuts to Versace déjà vu, relive the headline-making style moments from this year's event.
Read more »
‘Love At First Sight’ Wins 2025 Reply AI Film Festival In VeniceReply AI Film Festival crowns Jacopo Reale’s Love at First Sight as winner in Venice, awarding €8k top prize, with €5k to Mark Wachholz and €2k to Andrea Lommatzsch.
Read more »
All the Winners at the 2025 Venice Film FestivalFrom industry legend Jim Jarmusch to the Gaza-set “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” these were all the winners from the Venice Film Festival 2025.
Read more »
‘Blur’ Gets My Vote At Venice ImmersiveAt Venice Immersive 2025, Blur stood out as a buzzed-about hybrid of live performance and VR, exploring grief, memory, and the ethics of science.
Read more »
Venice Film Festival 2025, by the numbersFrom a record-breaking standing ovation to the ever-present Campari spritzes to even on-screen subtitles, the 2025 Venice Film Festival was a bounty of interesting numbers. After 10 days and dozens of red-carpet premieres, the 82nd edition came to a close Sunday.
Read more »