VR Film Festival At Home: Tribeca Cinema360 (Capsule Reviews)
Tribeca Film Festival’s Cinema360 program available for a limited time
For years now Tribeca Film Festival has been one of the key spots on the VR festival circuit, debuting both 360 films and showcasing daring experiential projects in the heart of America’s largest city. With the current crisis forcing a shutdown of this year’s festival, Tribeca’s organizers have sought different avenues for getting their curated work seen.
While the experiential work doesn’t distribute easily, Tribeca Immersive’s Cinema360 program is now publicly available and accessible via Oculus TV for Oculus Go and Oculus Quest headsets through April 26.
Members of our editorial team — Will Cherry, Kathryn Yu, and Noah Nelson — tackled the program to bring you these quick takes.
Program 1: Dreams to Remember
Capsule reviews by Kathryn Yu, Executive Editor, NoPro
1st Step
An inspiring (though sometimes slow-moving) look at the astronauts of Apollo 11 and 17: the first humans and last humans to step foot on the Moon. This 360 recreation hopscotches through time and space to show viewers some unusual perspectives. Being a fly on the ceiling of Apollo 11 or standing a few feet outside the Lunar Excursion Module right now reminds me of the heights of human ingenuity.
Rain Fruits
A beautiful, moving story of a man who leaves his native Myanmar in search of work in South Korea and the struggles he encounters in another country. Told using an impressionistic art style and holograms of actors, this eloquent piece starts out slow but leaves a lasting mark as we relive his memories. Content warning: one brief moment of violence
Dear Lizzy
A charming short monologue piece that drops the viewer into a bright, colorful world as our narrator, Lizzy, takes a walk as she reads a letter from a long lost friend. This charming piece doesn’t overstay its welcome and has me feeling like I’m traveling through a pop-up book but at miniature size.
Forgotten Kiss
Based on the story of the same name by Alexander Kuprin, this film uses a combination of computer generated graphics and motion captured performers to tell the legend of a prince and the forgotten kiss of a fairy. Unfortunately, the cold, spare art style clashes with the performers who are dressed in frilly whites and the film spends most of its energy telling us the story, rather than showing it to us.
Program 2: Seventeen Plus
Capsule reviews by Noah Nelson, Publisher NoPro
A Safe Guide to Dying
After starting off with a content warning about suicide and then a quick series of vignettes of exactly that, A Safe Guide settles into a rhythm that jumps the viewer from cyberspace (all the suicides were simulated), the real world, and a kind of middle ground that is at once panopiticon and day planner. There are some nifty futurist ideas woven into the morose tale of a older man looking to go out on his own terms. Not exactly the feel good story of the year, and there are some hiccups here and there, but the framing devices point to different ways of thinking about video and VR.
Black Bag
The art style of Black Bag is striking as all get out: characters that look hand-drawn moving through a dark dreamscape. The dialogue-free narrative unfolds at a good clip, and there are a few moments that definitely only have impact because of the medium. Aside from being darkly pretty, however, the story falls flat as the layered imagery never hooks into a coherent emotional arc.
The Pantheon of Queer Mythology
Massive God-like figures are a theme of this collection, and Pantheon envisions a collection of deities attuned to various queer identities. The immensely detailed iconography is executed in a maximal style, as each of the new gods is rendered as a CGI still life. The camera here seems to jump point of focus here from scene to scene in an unfortunate manner. For the right audience, however, the images alone may hold a certain ineffable power.
Saturnism
This realization of Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son is uniquely disturbing. All the visual elements of the painting are here, brought to life through animation. While the fixed camera forces you along at its own pace — it would be really great to have some more agency in this scenario — the star of the show is the titular Titan. Spoiler alert: you’re clearly one of his kids.
Program 3: Kinfolk
Capsule reviews by Will Cherry, XR Correspondent, NoPro
Ferenj: A Graphic Memoir in VR
Ferenj is a beauty to behold. The artists move us in clouds of 3D points depicting a life between two cultural homes. At times you might feel lost or miss moments, but this is certainly a spectacle to take in, and an appreciation for spaces and people we remember in snippets of time that form our identity.
The Inhabited House
Diego Kompel accomplishes a dream we all have — to relive memories of childhood in the bespoke places they were captured. Using a (presumably painstaking) process of compositing his toddler home videos over a now-empty home, he delivers powerful messages of nostalgia and remembrance. Sometimes the cuts are odd, but he gives us time to breathe and enjoy the simpler moments of life no longer left to tape.
Home
Impeccably choreographed, Home rises well above the vast majority of 360 films. We are given the perspective of an Ama (grandma) in rural Taiwan as the family visits for the afternoon. In one impressive continuous take, we understand our own mental loss and the family’s love and distance. There are wonderful 360 techniques that drive authenticity throughout. There’s a pang of melancholy as we get to the end… one that we can’t help but feel.
Program 4: Pure Imagination
Capsule reviews by Will Cherry, XR Correspondent, NoPro
Lutaw
This Oculus For Good piece is a cute sister-and-brother story with an inkling of Pixar flair. We follow Geramy as she invents ways to get to school on another island (without ruining her homework by swimming). Her adorable-but-fruitless attempts provoke the sibling bond that gives it heart. 360 capture only scratches the surface, so hopefully Oculus will produce a realtime version before long.
Attack on Daddy
Wildly weird, Attack on Daddy is possibly the best definition of this program as “pure imagination.” Filmmakers play with the great camp of action films, magical realism, and family connection in an adorable fashion to make you laugh through it. We must commend the new camera angles and risks in this piece that we haven’t seen before in 360.
Tale of the Tibetan Nomad
Tale is told as folklore, teaching us a lesson of greener pastures and being content with the life we have. We follow a Tibetan shepherd in a magical realist setting. It’s a slower piece filled with beautiful flute moments and authentic set-design, but its pacing may be too slow for some viewers.
Upstander
Another Oculus for Good short, Upstander hits us with charm right from the beginning. An animated world of backpacks simulates our own, with common threads of bullying and the choice to stand up for those pushed down. The most evocative scene has us physically bombarded by digital abuse, which directly parallels emotional bombardment — we can’t help but flinch.
Bonus: The Key
Céline Tricart’s multi-award-winning title The Key also drops onto the Oculus Store for free today on Quest and Rift! Last year saw the work’s premiere at Tribeca, and we can now bring this story home. Wrapped in mystery, The Key takes us on a surreal journey through loss, as we unravel and understand how much someone’s experience is less fantasy and more haunting.
After experiencing The Key, check out our interview between creator Céline Tricart and NoPro Editor-In-Chief Kathryn Yu.
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