Exploring The New Frontier @ Sundance 2021
NoPro’s guide to what we’re anticipating at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival
This week sees the return of the Sundance Film Festival, albeit in a form unlike any festival before it. With the whole of the festival going online due to the ongoing pandemic, both the films and the social dimension of the event will take place in browser windows and VR headsets around the globe.
We’ve got an eye on both the New Frontier programming, which every year offers up a selection of dynamic experiments in narrative and documentary experiments, and the social platform being built by Active Theory.
Let’s start with the platform, which is what makes this year’s festival truly unique in the XX history of the event.
Open to all Festival pass holders, including the inexpensive Explorer Pass, the New Frontier platform takes the form of a space station with three distinct areas: The New Frontier Gallery, the Cinema House, and Film Party, an interactive bar. Festival goers will be able to navigate by browser window or using a VR headset.
As depicted in preview images, users have a stylized humanoid avatar that is topped off with a user icon for a face. Voice chat is opt-in, which means you always have the choice as to whether or not you want to hear & speak to those around you.
Here’s how the three spaces break down:
The New Frontier Gallery where the complete slate of live performances, AR, VR, and other emerging media works from New Frontier can be experienced. Most projects can be viewed 24 hours a day. Audio and video proximity chat functions 11:00 a.m. MT to 11:59 p.m. MT.
Cinema House, the Festival’s social, fully immersive cinema. Schedule of screenings:
Cinema House Short Films — 1/29 8 p.m. MT
Station to Station — 1/31 3 p.m. MT
Users (2021 US Doc Competition) — 2/1 7 p.m. MT
Mother of George — 2/2 5 p.m. MTFilm Party, an interactive bar with 6 screens and more intimate rooms available to all Festival passholders. Here you can safely gather together with others in their avatar form, hang out and connect via proximity audio and video chat. Audio and Video proximity chat functions which you use to party are active 11:00 a.m. MT to 11:59 p.m. MT
NoPro’s Ones To Watch
With 14 New Frontier projects and a whole week to check the out, it will be fairly easy to catch most of the work. Yet if you’re still looking for where to start, I’ve got a few pieces I’m making a beeline to:
7 Sounds — Documentarian Sam Green has created an “immersive live-streamed audio-video work exploring the universal influence of sound, weaving seven specific audio recordings into a meditation on the power of sound to bend time, cross borders, and profoundly shape our perception.” I still remember when I saw Green’s Oscar nominated The Weather Underground years ago, so I’m very curious to see what he does in our wheelhouse.
The Changing Same: Episode 1 — This one is billed as an “episodic virtual reality experience” that explores “the connected historical experiences of racial injustice in America. A respectful, haunting story infused with magical realism and Afrofuturism about the uninterrupted cycle of the 400-year history of racial terror — past and present.” A very of-the-moment project, to say the least.
Nightsss — The capsule description here either works for you: “a virtual erotic poem created in artistic animation with ASMR and interactive elements, immersing the viewer in the sensual experience of poetry and dance” or it doesn’t. Personally, they had me at “poem” and “ASMR.”
Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran — This performance uses both laptop browser and Instagram to weave a ” darkly comedic, urgent new play about entitlement, consumption and digital technology, exploring the ubiquitous feeling that our societies are falling apart through the story of two young members of the Iranian elite, asking what their deaths tell us about climate change, social collapse and Instagram.” And you know we’re always up for some multi-platform theatrical gambles.
Traveling the Interstitium with Octavia Butler . Multiple artists, including An Oversimplification of Her Beauty’s “explore the ideas” of seminal science fiction author Octavia Butler, “voyaging into the interstitium: a liminal space, a cultural memory, containing the remnants of our ancestors.” I’d be on board for Nance alone, as Oversimplification was one of the most mind blowing works I’ve gotten to see pretty much ever. What’s truly thrilling is all the voices that are going to get a chance to riff on Butler’s work: whose Hugo and Nebula award winning novels helped define a generation of Sci-Fi.
Of course the true joy of a festival isn’t the plans you make, but what you discover you never knew you’d love: projects, creators, new friends. To that end, you might want to be inside the social space this Friday at 6PM MT (that’s 5 Pacific) because we miiiight just be doing an impromptu happy hour of our own. It’s not official in the least, but we hope to see you there.
You can hear more about this year’s New Frontier in our podcast interview with New Frontier Chief Curator Shari Frilot and Active Theory co-founder Michael Anthony.
Discover the latest immersive events, festivals, workshops, and more at our new site EVERYTHING IMMERSIVE, new home of NoPro’s show listings.
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