XR – Extended Reality

The XR Competition invites us to change our perspective, our body, and sometimes even our world. The audience navigates through universes where images are not merely viewed, but inhabited, shared, and felt. Immersion is not a simple technological gimmick here, but rather a new way of telling stories, experiencing emotions, and facing others as well as ourselves.

This selection brings together works that explore VR (virtual reality), AR (augmented reality), and hybrid forms of storytelling that challenge the conventions of cinema and visual art. These intimate, interactive, and contemplative experiences blur the lines between spectator and protagonist, ultimately placing us at the center of the narrative. Whether traveling through a territory in crisis, stepping into another persona, or wandering through imaginary worlds, the five films in competition offer a unique sensorial journey.

The XR Competition is also a laboratory where artists, developers, writers, and technicians come together to invent the storytelling forms of tomorrow. By experimenting with haptics and persistent virtual worlds, these creators prove that XR has become a demanding and fertile artistic field of its own. Their shared ambition is to open up spaces for play, reflection, and empathy that extend the experience well beyond the time spent wearing the headset.

Whether you’re curious, a newcomer, or already passionate about XR, this competition is an invitation to surrender to the unknown, to accept losing your bearings in order to better discover new ones. There’s no right way to “watch” these works: you live them, you explore them, you experience them at your own pace and according to your own sensibilities. To enter the XR Competition is to accept losing some control and allowing yourself to be surprised—and perhaps, for the duration of the experience, seeing the world differently.

This 2026 XR competition consists of five films:

• A long Goodbye by Victor Maes and Kate Voet, where we slip into the skin of Ida, who suffers from dementia. Her reality fades away, and we spend a day in her life, in a poetic and dreamlike universe. The film won the Venice Immersive Achievement Prize in 2025.
• If You See a Cat is the 4^th consecutive selection for Atsushi Wada at the Clermont-Ferrand ISFF. Wada has brilliantly made the switch to XR with a story about a boy struggling with mental health, which he chooses to treat with humor thanks to a storytelling device that takes the point of view of the boy’s cat.
• The Dollhouse by Dominic Desjardins and Charlotte Bruneau is a cruel tale told using virtual reality inside of an unfolding paper world which explores how power dynamics are born in the privacy of our homes.
• La Fille qui explose (The Exploding Girl) by Jonathan Vinel and Caroline Poggi was selected in its “flat” version for the Lab competition at the Clermont-Ferrand ISFF in 2025. The film successfully transitioned to VR with the young protagonist who carries within her the torments of youth and the anger of younger generations towards the world and the issues they are faced with, whether politics or the environment.
• Impulse: Playing with Reality by Barry Gene Murphy and May Abdalla is an impressive mixed reality film narrated by Tilda Swinton, winner of the Venice Immersive Achievement Prize, bearing the testimony of people with living with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in an environment that unfolds before the viewer in augmented reality.