Three Czech films at Venice film festival to include mixed-reality installation about Ukraine
Three Czech films are set to screen at the Venice film festival at the end of this summer – including a mixed-reality immersive film set in a Ukrainian living room. Although none of the Czech offerings this year are in the running for the Golden Lion in the main Venezia 81 competition, all are competing in smaller categories.
After Party, the debut film by director and screenwriter Vojtěch Strakatý, about a girl whose carefree life changes radically when bailiffs come to evict her family from their house, will be in the Orizzonti Extra section, which features works of different genres that aim to innovate and demonstrate creative originality.
Meanwhile, the documentary Wishing on a Star by Slovak director Peter Kerekes, a Czech-Italian-Croatian-Austrian-Slovak co-production about a quirky fortune teller, Luciana, is competing in the Orizzonti competition, which is aimed at films representing the latest aesthetic and expressive trends in cinema.
But perhaps the most unusual-sounding of the three is Fragile Home by Ondřej Moravec and Victoria Lopukhina, a mixed reality film about Ukraine that has no characters, no plot and no audience. For those not in the know, Ondřej Moravec explains what exactly mixed reality is.
“The principle of mixed reality is that you’re mixing digital elements with the real world around you. In virtual reality, you put on a helmet and you are totally immersed in a 3D or film world – you can’t see anything around you in the physical world. But in a mixed-reality installation, you put on a headset, but the headset has a camera on top, so it also projects what is around you in the physical space. It takes this data and combines it with the 3D elements.”
The film, apart from using 3D mixed-reality, is not your typical cinema experience. Rather than sitting in an auditorium with other audience members, viewers come one-by-one to see it.
“The space is more reminiscent of a gallery. We have a physical installation of a living room, and you enter it as one audience member and put on the headset. It’s open for 12 hours and people can go any time during that window to experience it.”
The film is set in a Ukrainian living room, but rather than interacting with people, the main character is the room itself. Users can see pictures of people on the walls, but those are the only human elements – otherwise, they interact only with the furniture and objects in the room.
“The interactions are quite gentle, so it’s not like you can experience something totally different to the viewer before you, like in an interactive game where the story branches. But it depends which details you choose to focus on – for example, a user could go around the flat and notice that there is a postcard or note from somebody in the family. Or you can miss it, but find some other detail. But that’s the same as in classic film – a 2D film shows you stories and symbols and narratives, and some of them you absorb and some you don’t.”
All the objects in the film are connected with real people, but it combines several people’s stories together to create the story of a fictional Ukrainian family. Rather than following a traditional narrative arc, the film uses the changing environment to tell the story.
“Originally the idea was that it would be more like a narrative film, but then we decided to turn it into something more abstract, by only telling the story through the changing environment. So you’re in a physical living room, which gradually changes into the living room of a Ukrainian family. You interact with the objects around you and it changes over time, through the 2013 Euromaidan revolution and continuing through 2022 when the full-scale invasion started.”
Moravec says the aim of the film is to connect those of us who are now living in peace and safety with Ukrainians who are living through war, through the near-universal experience of attachment to home.
“When you are going through these changes in the environment, from one side you are connected to the Ukrainian people and you think about what is happening to them in their living rooms, but you also think about your own flat – because it could be you, it could be your flat, and what happened to them could happen to you.”
Fragile Home is competing in the Venice Immersive category, which is entirely devoted to immersive media and Extended Reality (XR).
The 81st Venice International Film Festival is taking place from 28 August to 7 September 2024.
