EXCLUSIVE: Taiwan’s Flash Forward Entertainment is bringing four VR immersive projects to the Cannes market, following winning the festival’s inaugural Immersive Competition last year.
The Island Of Shells is a documentary based on political prisoner Fred Chin’s story and allows viewers to experience Taiwan’s White Terror era of repression as they become museum guides, drawn into a shadow-puppetry fable layered over real history. In post-production, it is co-produced with Denmark’s Khora and France’s Digital Rises. Chang Hao-Yuan is directing, along with co-directors Wei Shiue-Ying and Ko Chia-Wen.
Wei-Yao Hung’s Return To Zealandia is a LBE (location based entertainment) multi-player VR experience that blends myth, colonial history, and multisensory design as it reframes Taiwan’s early global entanglements in the 17th-century.
Chu Chien-an’s 1981: The Death Of A Professor is a multi-player mixed reality experience based on the unsolved death of pro-democracy professor Chen Wen-Cheng that invites audiences to witness key moments of his life and state persecution. A prototype has been completed for both this and Return To Zealandia.
In addition, The Shadow by French-Spanish choreographer Blanca Li is an immersive mixed reality dance theatre that reinterprets Andersen’s classic tale about a scientist’s shadow that comes to life.
Colored was the first immersive project that Flash Forward co-produced and went on to win the best immersive work at Cannes last year.
“That recognition affirmed a belief I already held: immersive storytelling can reach emotional and historical depths that traditional cinema often cannot,” said Flash Forward founder Patrick Mao Huang. “As a company rooted in international co-productions, expanding into the immersive space was a natural progression, both creatively and strategically.”
He further explained that government support is crucial to make this possible. “TAICCA and the Kaohsiung City Government have been remarkably forward-thinking in supporting immersive and tech-based storytelling,” he added. “Through public funding, talent incubation, international exchange, and global market access, they’ve enabled creators to explore new forms of narrative and the technologies and business models that sustain them.”
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