Between the 17 and 23 of October 2016, Astra Film Festival introduces an exceptional itinerant expedition from classic documentary cinema to the latest technologies to which the film is subject, from collective viewing in the film theater to leading-edge cinematic experiences of 360-degree cross-media screenings inside a dome or film viewing with virtual reality goggles.
The finest auteur documentaries which have recently been made worldwide are included in the competition section OutStanDox. Dead Slow Ahead (directed by Mauro Herce) – awarded at film festivals in Lisbon, Locarno and Jihlava, Depth Two (directed by Ognjen Glavonić) or The New Man (directed by Aldo Garay) –Teddy Award for best documentary at Berlin International Film Festival are only some of the films that zoom in on human realities and feature dramas from an unclear past or from a murky present, beyond barriers, clichés and settings.
From the real world to virtual reality
AFF 2016 sets forth a novel programme of immersive documentaries, which includes creative productions made in new formats: virtual reality, 360-degree videos, full-dome and web documentaries.
For the first time in Romania, in the Great Square in Sibiu a dome-shaped film theater will be set up, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to view 360-degree films on a screen shaped like a dome. 8 documentaries, out of which 3 were particularly selected for Astra Film Junior, will provide the audience with a thrilling experience owing to the enhanced visual field and the sounds coming from all sides. This type of screening gives the viewers the impression that everything happens around them and the feeling that they are present first-hand at the heart of the events in the film. Full-dome documentaries transpose film buffs face to face with the fascinating spectacle of the northern lights (Aurora: Lights of Wonder), with the art of flying (Dream of Fly) or with battle scenes from the Second World War (World 2 War).
How does one see the world through the goggles of the future?
At Astra Film Sibiu, viewers will have the opportunity to experience and interact with the help of VR goggles: Oculus Rift, for interactive viewing, and Samsung Gear VR, for 360-degree films. Virtual reality paves the way for empathy-based communication: the shared perspective creates a sort of understanding, and the user, isolated in the digital space, becomes part of the virtual world and has the chance to do various things: he can manipulate objects or even physically move around the fictional universe, making him thus feel as an integral part of the presented event.
What would it be like to travel around London by tube, seconds before the 2015 terrorist attacks (Witness)? Or perhaps you are curious to see what it’s like to live in a virtual cell in an American prison (”6x9” A Virtual Experience of Solitary Confinement)? 30 million children in South Sudan, Syria and Ukraine have migrated because of the war in the past few years, and their incredible stories are just one pair of goggles away (The Displaced). 8 documentaries from the AFF programme will reveal the world with the help of VR goggles, which is also a first in Sibiu.
The AFF selection also comprises 10 web documentaries, all of them integrating the 360-degree format, and 3 of them are Romanian productions that present different isssues of Communism: the Râmnicu Sărat prison, a virtual exhibition about abortion in Communist Romania or the Communist Film Depot in Cluj.
Citizens on the online world
3 films unveil the unknown sides of the land we are stepping in when we get online, a land which seems to be full of unexplored features, legislation and geography. Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World (directed by Werner Herzog) portrays people whose personal passion, imagination, technical skills and creativity have contributed to invent and to further shape the world we know today as the Internet. If it were to further explore the human geography of this online land, the biggest country today for sure would be the country of the Facebook community, comprising 1.7 billion active users, inhabitants. “What are the laws in the nation of Facebook and what happens if you break them?” is the starting point of the film Facebookistan (directed by Jakob Gottschau). Down the Deep, Dark Web (directed by Duki Dror) invites us to dive beneath the ‘regular’, ‘official’ search engine of the indexed, tracked online world, and into the underbelly of the Internet, the digital underworld, the only place where the flagship of the idea of free Internet can still be found.
”We particularly wanted to include in the programme of this year’s edition, aside from classic documentary cinema, a selection of the latest formats of immersive documentary: full-dome, VR or 36-degree videos. Therefore, we perpetuate the initial idea of the festival which began 23 years ago as a cinema platform synchronised with what is happening wordwide in terms of film production”, declared Dumitru Budrala, founding director of Astra Film Sibiu.
