VR & Immersive Competition
Virtual reality has matured into one of the most expressive languages of contemporary art, capable of holding a viewer inside a world and letting them feel its weight from within. For this edition, we have brought together six VR and immersive experiences, all Greek premieres produced in the last eighteen months, competing for the new AegeanFF VR Seahorse Award. The selection ranges from animation and dance to interactive fable.
Every Day • 16 – 24 July • 18.00 – 23.00
The Programme runs in 40 minutes slots.
Book your tickets for €10 per slot at the main Box Office in Patmion.
VR & Immersive Competition
16 – 24 July • 18.00 – 23.00
The Awake
Greek Premiere • VR Animation • 27 min • Taiwan • 2025
Director: Hsiao-Ting Hsieh
Language: No dialogue
Inspired by the lived reality of ALS, The Awake is an immersive dance VR experience exploring bodies trapped in silence. Through abstract movement, theatrical imagery, and shifting spaces, dancers embody struggle, guilt, and hope. Blending reality and virtuality, the work invites reflection on fragility, resilience, and the will to live.
The Contrast or Illusion
Greek Premiere • Interactive VR • 6 min • Poland • 2025
Director: Mariusz Borzyszkowski
Language: No dialogue
We are exposed to evaluations every day, and the norm by which they are made is usually out of our hands. The story explores what we face in a world dominated by mechanisms of rating, measuring, and judging. Is the evaluation truly systematic, or are the outcomes more random, shaped by factors beyond our control? This VR experience shifts the viewer’s role: you are no longer an observer, but the one being judged, becoming the object of observation and evaluation by sixteen virtual characters whose behaviour, driven by a random algorithm, can accept or expel you from the environment.
Insider Outsider
Greek Premiere • VR Animation • 12:00 • France • 2025
Director: Philippe Cohen Solal
Language: French, English
INSIDER-OUTSIDER is an interactive virtual reality musical experience inspired by the life of Henry Darger, a world-renowned “outsider artist” whose work remained unknown until his death.
Feedback VR, an anti-futurist musical
Greek Premiere • Musical Performance VR • 19:00 • Peru • 2025
Director: Collective AMiXR
Language: Spanish, English
After ingesting a mystical beverage, the user will be drawn into a spiritual ritual that takes the form of a digital nightmare. In this liminal space, their physical bodies and ancestral traditions confront the infinite possibilities and threats of the virtual world.
Sosowon: The Season of the Flying Fish
International Premiere • VR Animation • 17 min • Taiwan • 2025
Director: Nina Barbier.
Language: Mandarin, English.
“Sosowon: The Season of the Flying Fish” is a VR tale from Taiwan’s Orchid Island, where a grandfather shares a tale to comfort his grandson. Viewers embody a flying fish escaping human & environmental threats. Inspired by Tao (Yami) traditions, the experience blends magical realism with tribal life, urging reflection on nature & coexistence.
Mirage
Greek Premiere • VR Interactive • 8:00 • Bangladesh, Netherlands • 2025
Director: Naima Karim
Language: English
Mirage is an interactive Virtual Reality storytelling experience of a young girl who is battling depression and anxiety. Set in a desert landscape, it is a metaphoric and stylized adaptation with visuals created by the artist Naima Karim’s painting style and lived experience with her daughter’s depression and anxiety.
Under the Spotlight: Elsewhere
Elsewhere brings together three works bound by memory and displacement. Across exile, loss, and childhood, each piece follows someone caught between where they are and where they long to be, returning to a place that now exists only in memory: a homeland, a family, a world left behind. Elsewhere is that in-between space, the distance between a person and the home they carry within.
Another Place
VR Animation • 19 min • France • 2025
Director: Domenico Singha Pedroli
Language: Thai, English
Renée is a ghost. She became one when a Facebook post forced her to flee Thailand in 2022. Now she seeks asylum in France, stateless and unprotected, her refugee status still pending, and being a trans woman further complicates the procedure. In a limbo, she wanders Paris, missing her cats. But through her unbearable lightness, a way home will be found.
The Time Before
VR Animation • 15 min • United Kingdom • 2025
Director: Leo Metcalf
Language: English
Caught between waking life and dreams, Olly delves into his childhood memories, navigating the fantastical dream worlds his sister created to shield them from family strife. A journey into the buried past that shapes who we are.