Cannes 2024: Upping the XR game, Kolkata filmmaker Poulomi Basu’s ‘Maya’ added to new immersive competition category

Cannes 2024: Upping the XR game, Kolkata filmmaker Poulomi Basu's 'Maya' added to new immersive competition category

The blue fluid dripping beautifully into the sanitary napkin is probably the first lesson on menstruation that young people got in the post-television era. Beneath many layers of euphemisms, taboos and norms of decency, the blood and pain that come with menstruation are suppressed and hidden. This is the distance that society demands from menstruating women. Maya: Birth of a Superheroa new interactive virtual reality (VR) work or film, seeks to violate. The viewer, with the help of a VR headset, enters a red-hued fantasy world where they encounter demons of tampons, the female body, and pain.

Created by Kolkata-born artist and photographer Paulomi Basu and British filmmaker CJ Clarke, Maya The film is one of eight extended reality (XR) works competing in the Immersive Competition, a new category at the ongoing Cannes Film Festival. While films using XR or immersive technologies have been part of the festival before – in 2017, the festival featured Alejandro Iñárritu’s Carne y ArenaThe seven-minute long VR work – its promotion in the competition lineup signals that the film industry can no longer ignore the scope of this medium. This year’s selection was diverse, ranging from an augmented reality (AR) work on the Civil War to a location-based VR project exploring loneliness and an installation that placed the user inside a human body.

Kolkata-born artist and photographer Poulomi Basu

Kolkata-born artist and photographer Paulomi Basu

British filmmaker CJ Clarke

British filmmaker CJ Clarke

MayaThe 33-minute English-French film is the story of a young woman who moves from shame to empowerment after meeting a superhero in a dream. Using VR’s inherent ability to bend time and space and create claustrophobia, Basu takes viewers through the shame and loneliness experienced by a South Asian girl living in London who has just gone through her first menstrual period. (The character is voiced by British actor Charitra Chandran, who played Edwina Sharma in the second season of the Netflix series bridgerton,

pushing the boundaries

Basu says, “As an interdisciplinary artist, I move between mediums. For me, the tool or technique is not as important as the story. But in this case, the medium itself becomes the agent provocateur.” “The proximity of shame is very present and intimate in VR. The medium is also very suitable for dream stories. You are so close to it and that is not possible to achieve in any other medium. The audience is a participant in the storytelling. “

Bridging the distance between subjects and viewers is, perhaps, XR’s strongest aspect. It transcends and expands the spatial limitations of traditional two-dimensional cinema, giving audiences an intense and sensual experience. Immersive cinema is driven by a set of rapidly evolving technologies in the 1960s, particularly with the invention of the Sensorama by cinematographer Morton Heilig. It was well integrated into the gaming and entertainment industries as well as the education sector and social activism. The United Nations began using VR about a decade ago to create immersive films about refugee camps and crisis areas and dubbed the medium an “empathy machine.” Although whether VR can consistently produce empathy is a matter of debate, the objective in all these cases is the same: to provide viewers with a life-like experience in another place and in the shoes of another person.

In MayaThis place is a state of mind. “The feeling experienced in a situation like getting a period in class for the first time is similar to the trapped and isolated sensation of immersing oneself in a headset,” says Alap Parikh, technical director of the project, who led the team’s efforts to develop the technology. Gaye remembers this experience. Maya In three years: “In this medium, ideas and technology are very closely linked. You learn certain things only when you actually start creating something. As a result, plans and scripts constantly change, and so does the technology, and sometimes this results in absolute chaos.

Cost-intensive enterprises

Both Parikh and Basu agree that XR works require substantial funding – “a deceptively large amount of funding for a very small work” – which is often the biggest hurdle for an artist working in this field. Setting up interactive exhibitions is also expensive, which is where high-profile carnivals like the Cannes Film Festival come in. “The financial support offered by the festival to set up installations is crucial,” says Basu. “Also, being at Cannes, the most important film festival in the world, gives our stories much-needed visibility.”

Maya will be released globally on MetaQuest on May 30, and the team is also planning museum and gallery exhibitions in various locations. This is an exception, as distribution of interactive XR works is highly limited. “The global North is seeing a few companies that partner with venues and bring in specialized knowledge to effectively manage the distribution of XR pieces. I hope this eventually comes to India as well,” says Parikh, who moved to Goa a few years ago after living and working in New York.

While interactive installations in India are still few and far between, the country saw a wave of VR filmmaking in the middle of the last decade, with news companies, new media studios and mainstream film companies getting involved with the technology. “But it’s outdated now”, says Mumbai-based sound designer Neeraj Gera, who was part of the three-member team that created it. jet lag (2014), one of India’s first VR films. “This is a rapidly evolving environment. Users demand more from 360-degree VR. Maybe you need to simplify it, explore the sonic possibilities.

Independent filmmaker and video game artist Avinash Kumar says it is the niche nature of the medium, rather than the infrastructure, that is slowing down its growth. “Headsets are no longer too expensive. But globally, it remains a niche medium, used more in other industries than in art. In India, XR is used more in military and space research, by architects and academic institutions, than by artists. Grants from institutions and corporations remain the only source of funding for these projects, which are heavily dependent on the international circuit of film festivals and galleries,” he laments.

The author is a film critic and independent researcher.

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