The Frame Beyond, organized in collaboration with AN-ICON in the framework of the International Short Film Festival Concorto, presents two virtual reality works selected from the best of the current international panorama. Virtual Reality is a medium increasingly approaching its visual maturity, continuing to dialogue with cinema while hybridizing its language with the performative characteristics of theater and the imaginative freedom of CGI. By enveloping the user in a 360-degree environment, VR can transport us to another place, to evoke empathic responses of co-presence, and to demand intense participation. Moreover, it is precisely because of its power that the expressiveness of VR is proving increasingly suitable for confronting political issues in an original way, and for renovating the structures of memory and imagination. 

The two works presented are particularly in dialogue with Concorto's aesthetic and political scope. Emperor is an interactive animation that transports the user into the forced incommunicability of an aphasic father: here, VR becomes a tool for "touching" the intensity of the memories that remain. In Mirror, on the other hand, we are literally drawn into the mental landscapes of the unconscious and family relationships, between dream and nightmare.

Free access, with Arci membership, upon booking.

Programme

鏡子 (Mirror) by Wu De-Chuen, Taiwan, 2023, VR 360, 3DOF

Three tin toys revolving around three generations confront family conflicts. The male members are rushed by the relentless passage of time, growing into the “adults” they once despised, as if trapped in a mirror image, entangled in oneiric memories.

Empereur by Marion Burger and Ilan Cohen, France e Germany, 2023, VR 360, 6DOF

Empereur invites the user to travel inside the brain of a father suffering from aphasia: it is the story of a man who has lost the ability to speak and his daughter who tries to communicate with him, both trying to break through the tangled fabric of memories that remain.