VR competition at Venice Film Festival 2017

Culture
31 Mar 17

The 74th Venice International Film Festival has a surprise up its sleeve. A first competition for Virtual Reality (VR) films. This became clear after Paolo Baratta and Alberto Barbera announced the news on Wednesday. Its jury will be composed out of five leading creatives and will give away three prices: Best VR film, grand VR jury prize and best VR creativity award.

The festival has been running ahead for quite some time. Last year, they launched the first film festival VR screening room at the Palazzo del Casino. The clips that were shown at the time, came from the very first feature-length VR film Jesus VR - The Story of Christ .

This year Venice also launched a Biennale College Cinema for Virtual Reality which means that nine teams will be working on VR short films. The winners will receive a 32.000 Dollar contribution to their project provide by Sony Corp. and will screen during the festival. Nine projects are currently on its way from countries including Italy, USA, Denmark, France, Israel, Serbia, Philippines and The Netherlands.

The Venice Film Festival takes places August 31 till September 5