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Venice Immersive 2025 Crowns Three, Rewards Are Many


The Grand Prize for Best Immersive Experience at the 82nd Venice Film Festival, went to The Clouds Are 2000 Metres Up, by. The Achievemenet award went to A Long Goodbye. A special jury prize was awarded to Less Than 5 Gr of Saffron.

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.

The Clouds Are 2000 Meters Up, 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 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, directed by Négar Motevalymeidanshah (France, 2025), 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 moment.

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.

Blur, 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. Blur left audiences stunned and speechless, a hybrid of theater and XR that lingers as memory more than story. Blur was the experience that built the most buzz among attendees, but the magic didn’t extend to the judges. I liked it so much I wrote a stand alone story about it which you can read here.

Doug Liman premiered Asteroid 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.

D-Day Camera Soldier 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.

Apple’s first scripted immersive short film, Submerged, 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: Point Zero. 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 (Out of Competition) XR section at the 2025 Venice International Film Festival.

The Reality of Hope is a short New Yorker documentary by Joe Hunting (We Met in VR) 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 the Reality of Hope’s showing at Venice Immersive, we watch it inside of VR in an existing furry tree house theater that also appears in the film.

8pm & The Cat Jeonyeok 8si wa goyangi (8 pm and the cat) 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.

Wayne McGregor: On The Other Earth 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.

Ancestors, Face Jumping, and Reflections of Little Red Dot, are three extraordinary experiences I saw at SXSW in March that were among the best experiences on the Island.