In the largest cinema at the Venice film festival, guests gather for the premiere of Frankenstein, Guillermo del Toro’s lavish account of a man who dared to play God and created a monster. When the young scientist reanimates a dead body for his colleagues, some see it as a trick while others are outraged. “It’s an abomination, an obscenity,” shouts one hide-bound old timer, and his alarm is partly justified. Every technological breakthrough opens Pandora’s box. You don’t know what’s going to crawl out or where it will then choose to go.
Behind the main festival venue sits the small ruined island of Lazzaretto Vecchio. Since 2017, it’s been home to Venice Immersive, the event’s groundbreaking section dedicated to showcasing and supporting XR (extended reality) storytelling. Before that it was a storage facility, before that a plague quarantine zone. Eliza McNitt, this year’s jury president, remembers the time when work on the exhibits had to be paused because the builders had uncovered human bones in the ground. “There’s something haunting about the fact that we come to the oldest film festival in the world to present this new form of cinema,” she says. “We’re exploring the medium of the future, but we’re also in conversation with ghosts.”
