The 77th Cannes Film Festival will include an Immersive Film Competition

Immersive Film Competition announced for upcoming Cannes Film Festival

For the first time in its history, the Cannes Film Festival will launch a new section of competition this year for immersive films.

The international festival is keeping with the times by acknowledging the arrival of immersive cinema and dedicating a section of competition to it.

The festival was also the first to break ground in this field when it selected Alejandro González Iñárritu’s virtual reality film, Carne y Arena (Virtually Present, Physically Invisible), for official selection for the 70th Cannes Film Festival back in 2017. The immersive film earned a special Academy Award that year, and Iñárritu himself went on to serve as the president of the jury for the festival in 2019.

The spotlight will grow a little wider this year for the new style of cinema after Variety reported on the arrival of the Immersive Competition for next month’s festival.

In total, eight immersive pieces will take part in the new competition, and a selection of non-competitive works will also be included in the program. In a statement from 2017 discussing the work of Iñárritu, the festival said, “immersive, collective and interactive works that utilize virtual reality, augmented reality and other cutting-edge technologies to transcend conventional storytelling and transport audiences to other worlds, narratives and eras.”

The jury overseeing the competition will consist of international figures from both the film and immersive art worlds. The winner of the competition will have the honor of receiving the festival’s first-ever prize for Best Immersive Work.

The virtual reality films will be shown outside of the festival’s grounds at the Cannes Cineum and the Georges Méliès Campus, a local university for film and creative writing.

While this is a new area of competition for Cannes, it is not the first festival to launch a competitive section for immersive films. In 2017, The Venice Film Festival started the Venice VR, which is a competition dedicated to immersive filmmaking.

It’s interesting to think of how far cinema has grown since it first began a little over 100 years ago. The move from silent films to ‘talkies’ and then from black and white into color, and now we have IMAX screens and virtual reality immersion. The welcoming of this new genre of filmmaking by landmark festivals like Venice and now Cannes is an important note in the young history of movies.

The 77^th Cannes Film Festival will take place from May 15 to 24.

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