The innovative Immersive: All around cinema competition section embraces works that make use of the most up-to-date technologies to showcase different views of an extended reality, paving new ways for the reception and interpretation of the moving images and the art of cinema as a whole. The Golden Alexander Immersive will be bestowed to the section’s best film, accompanied by a 2,000-euro cash prize.
The Immersive competition section of the 27th TiDF lines up 8 films echoing powerful political, social and historical vibes, while touching upon a series of issues related to the boundaries of human consciousness. This year’s Immersive: All around cinema films invite us to embark on a journey from the Ukrainian drama and the open wounds of Vietnam all the way to the first sparks of the struggle for the freedom of speech in China and the story of two heroic women who paved new ways amidst a male dominated world. Among the films featured in the Immersive competition section we are welcoming a Greek entry, 548 Days Without My Name by Yolanda Markopoulou, who had taken part in the 63rd Thessaloniki International Film Festival showcasing her exciting interactive installation White Dwarf.
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Ground Floor - Warehouse Pier Α, Port of Thessaloniki Duration-Working Hours: 06-16/03/2025 - 13:00-21:00 Ticket price: 3 euros |
In addition, the interactive visual art installation AI & Me by the art duo mots from Romania, formed by the filmmakers-transdisciplinary artists Daniela Nedovescu and Octavian Mot, within the framework of the 27th TiDF's Immersive: All around cinema. This thrilling installation, composed of two separate yet interconnected sections (The Confessional and AI Ego) delves into the unconfessed desire of humans to be subjected to a process of evaluation by AI. The initial portrait outlined by the machine is followed (for those selected by the machine) by a production of invented images featured on the screens placed in the venue, which depict the participants amidst a series of unfamiliar and eerie sceneries. An immersive experience that shakes our notion of personal identity, while bringing us face to face with a number of inconvenient and repressed thoughts that may have never crossed our minds before.
Daniela Nedovescu and Octavian Mot, collectively known as mots, are two Romanian filmmakers and transdisciplinary artists working together for over a decade and currently residing in Germany. They write and produce a variety of creative projects, ranging from multimedia installations to web series and films exploring the irony of human behavior. Despite most of their work being films or projects related to moving pictures, they occasionally enjoy rolling up their sleeves to build things in their workshop. These creations are usually machines designed to engage participants and prompt reflection on their own behavior. Recently, they've been drawn to the idea of using artificial intelligence as a tool in their work. Their interest lies not just in exploring its impact on society, but also in discovering new ways in which this novel and unfamiliar form of intelligence can reveal more about us as humans.
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West Guardhouse - Gate 1 Pier Α, Port of Thessaloniki Duration & Working Hours: 06-16/03/2025 - 13:00-21:00 Admission free |
The Immersive Jury is composed of:
Karen Cirillo (visual artist, curator & journalist,USA)
Scott Morris (lead digital producer for Tate, UK)
Stella Ntavara (coordinator of CPH:LAB and XR exhibitions at CPH:DOX, Greece)
Let’s take a glance at the Immersive: All around cinema competition films
548 Days Without My Name
Yolanda Markopoulou
Greece, 2024, 14’
In 1943, Rozina, 10 y.o., hiding from the Nazis in a small apartment in the centre of the city of Thessaloniki, she decides to write her diary under the fake name Roula Karakotsou. This was her only escape from the Nazis as she endured 548 days of nameless existence in silence. The viewer experiences her adventure through her childish gaze, her narratives, as long as she is hidden.
All I Know About Teacher Li
Zhuzmo
USA, 2024, 20’
A 20-minute interactive mixed-reality documentary unveiling how a Chinese art student in Italy sparked one of the largest democratic protests in China by relentlessly sharing bad news on Twitter. The experience blends hand-drawn animation, 3D-converted archival footage, and immersive interaction to place viewers within Teacher Li’s transformative journey and explore the global impact of social media activism.
Rapture II - Portal
Alisa Berger
France-Germany-Ukraine, 2024, 19’
The film revolves around Ukrainian Vogue dancer Marko and the confrontation with his abandoned apartment in the region of Donbas, where the war has been going on for ten years. It fuses the idea of a physical lost home and the body of a dancer as an infinite eternal home.
Revival Roadshow
Anne Fehres & Luke Conroy
The Netherlands-Australia-Cyprus, 2025, 17’
Revival Roadshow is a VR experience critiquing colonial legacies through the resurrection of a 17th-century Dutch explorer in a speculative future. Using interactive audio narration, the work blends surrealism and dark humour to critically explore myth-making and its impact on contemporary and future cultures.
Somewhere Unknown in Indochina
Asio Chihsiung Liu & Feng-Ting Tsou
Taiwan-Belgium-Canada-Vietnam-Cambodia, 2024, 37’
In the 1970s, amidst the chaos of the Vietnam War and the genocide committed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, a refugee crisis emerged in Indochina. Two young Vietnamese sisters fled from the wars to a Taiwanese refugee camp. Thirty years later, the elder sister is told that the camp will be demolished soon in her deceased sister’s dream.
Sweet End of the World!
Stefano Conca Bonizzoni
Italy, 2024, 15’
In a world teetering on the edge of collapse, a mother recounts a tale to her child about the destructive power of human greed. Sweet End of the World! invites us on a journey that blurs the line between myth and reality, uncovering the harbingers of an impending catastrophe. Through virtual reality, humanity confronts its fate, reimagining the apocalypse as a legacy to be preserved and passed on. There was a time when men and gods dined together, seated at the same table. Yet, human greed transformed the remnants of those feasts into a mountain of waste, destined to reach Olympus. This is the tale a mother tells her child as she nurses him at her breast—a bedtime myth for a good end to the world. Through virtual reality, the work takes us on a dreamlike journey, lingering on the threshold between sleep and wakefulness, between the present and ancient mythology, exploring places teetering on the edge of climate collapse, where we encounter heroes who might show us the way. This story unfolds during the most symbolic and intimate act we know: a mother breastfeeding her child. Maddalena and Ettore guide us through a visual narrative in which humanity, standing on the brink of the apocalypse, has transfigured the catastrophe it witnesses into a cautionary tale to be passed down. The message is clear: as long as human greed for food remains insatiable, and the craving for flesh endures, humanity's fate is sealed. “Sweet end of the world!”
Upwind
Florian Siebert
Germany, 2023, 25’
An immersive virtual reality film that brings to life the inspiring journey of Charlotte Möhring and Melli Beese, Germany's pioneering female aviators. Experience their groundbreaking quest to conquer the skies and break through the barriers of a male-dominated aviation world at the beginning of the 20th century.
User Agreement
Rafał Kruszka
Poland, 2024, 15’
A single-user VR experience exploring virtual interactivity and algorithmic behavior. It redefines user consent, integrating it into a layered digital interaction. The project also investigates algorithmic responses, exploring notions of consciousness, deception, and singularity, bridging human and non-human perspectives.
INTERACTIVE VISUAL ART INSTALLATION
ΑΙ & Me
Daniela Nedovescu & Octavian Mot (mots)
Germany, 2024
AI & Me is a multi-piece installation that explores the interaction between artificial intelligence and human participants. It encourages contemplation about the relationship between humans and AI, particularly focusing on the themes of judgment, perception, and the human willingness to be analyzed by machines. Central to this experience is The Confessional, a piece where participants are subject to AI's unfiltered analysis, receiving a unique blend of description, imagination, and advice from the machine's perspective.
Accompanying pieces like AI Ego further expand this narrative, offering diverse, AI-generated interpretations of human identity and existence. The installation not only challenges our comfort with technological judgment but also provokes thought on the broader implications of having AI in our lives.
The Confessional is a personal experience where participants sit in a cube-like structure to face an unfiltered machine evaluation based solely on their appearance. The AI writes blunt, often humorous, or biting observations and then generates an imagined portrait of the participant on the CRT monitor placed inside the structure. It’s raw, provocative, and uniquely personal—pushing boundaries of how we perceive ourselves and artificial judgment.
AI Ego is a piece composed of a series of screens that display participants from The Confessional in surreal, AI-generated scenarios. These imagined scenes, created a few minutes after the experience in The Confessional, only feature participants "liked" by the machine. The installation invites participants to reflect on their self-image and how they see themselves when reinterpreted through the lens of artificial intelligence.
