Hailing a cab instead of heading to a cinema is a reflection of the global entertainment industry’s newfound diversity in storytelling. Some of the finest artistic creations at Cannes are not about movies anymore. The Immersive Competition, launched last year at the Cannes festival, has gathered a clutch of works combining cutting-edge technology to produce new forms of storytelling through spatial and sensory experience. The technology involves gaming, artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR), extended reality (ER) and video mapping.
One of the nine entries in the Cannes Immersive Competition this year is tAxI, a multi-sensory installation that transforms the backseat of a self-driving cab into a confessional. Passengers are encouraged to open up to an unseen driver who, in turn, tells stories as the cab negotiates the traffic virtually. “In a near future where autonomous cars are the new taxis, the conversation and confession between a driver and a passenger brings back the human connection,” says Michael Arcos, one of the three directors of tAxI, a 10-minute experience using AI as the medium.
In AI-powered tAxI, the backseat of a self-driving cab becomes a confessional
“The idea is to create an innovative, new way of storytelling,” adds co-director Stephen Henderson.
The car used by the directors in Cannes is a 1984 Renault 4, conceived in the 1950s by the French automobile giant as an urban and rural vehicle for everybody’s needs. A hidden microphone captures the passenger’s voice inside the car as AI-generated city landscapes shift outside the windows. The stories and secrets of passengers go into the invisible driver’s ever-expanding archive for retelling without revealing the identity of the passenger.
(From left) tAxI directors Stephen Henderson, Michael Arcos and Yamil Rodriguez
“Where are you heading today?” the driver’s voice asks me as I step into the backseat of the taxi. I inform that I am returning home from work. “I once had a passenger who was also heading home from work like you, but he got so lost in his head because of work pressure he forgot where his home was. That dude was a damn mess,” says the driver. Another passenger had a frightening story about a haunted house, says the voice of the driver, who can speak 40 languages. “The back of a taxi is an intimate space where you can share a story,” says tAxI’s co-director Yamil Rodriguez.
SHAKESPEARE & SURVEILLANCE
Another world premiere in Cannes Immersive is Lili, a half-an-hour PC game set in Iran. Directed by Iranian-Canadian artist Navid Khonsari, Lili tells the story of Leila Lili Mahmoudi, wife of a militia commander in an Iranian city shrouded in secrets, scheming a murder for her husband’s ascent to power. The world’s first gaming adaptation of Macbeth, Lili, which was created in collaboration with the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), allows gamers to replace the play’s famous witches and change the course of the tragedy that takes on a contemporary tone.
Lili is the first video game to compete at Cannes. In this adaptation of Macbeth, gamers replace the witches and change the course of the tragedy
“A few years ago, the RSC was looking to take Macbeth to the digital world to reach a global audience away from the play’s brick-and-mortar aspect of theatre,” says Khonsari, who was a director of the popular Grand Theft Auto video game. “We became interested in Lady Macbeth because 400 years after the play was published, women face the same challenges as she did with her gender,” he adds. Then came the 2022 protests in Iran against the death of Mahsa Amini, who was arrested for not wearing the hijab, and the game grew into one against surveillance and gender segregation. Lili, says the game’s co-creator Vassiliki Khonsari, pushes the boundaries of storytelling and allows mediums like film, theatre, game and immersive to collide and collaborate to reimagine new possibilities.
In Lili, the first game ever to compete at the Cannes festival, a viewer is handed a USB key to start the game. “I vow to bring chaos to tyrants. Fair is foul and foul is fair,” announces the computer in resonance with Macbeth’s famous quote. The gamers replace the witches as dark web hackers who clone phones, download photos and hack profiles and personal information to help Lili survive. “The halfan-hour game of Lili is the prequel to a full version of Macbeth that will go online as a game,” says Khonsari, who created the 2018 virtual reality installation, Hero, which put the viewer inside the war in Syria.
CAROLYN & CONVERSION
In the Current of Being, an 18-minute VR work, tells the real-life story of Carolyn Mercer, a UK citizen put to brutal conversion therapy half a century ago to “correct” her gender identity. With the help of wearables, including two pairs of gloves, a haptic vest and sleeves, a viewer experiences the electric shock that Mercer was administered in the therapy. “This is a therapy that damages you for life,” says Mercer, a transgender survivor of electroshock conversion therapy, in the VR installation. “You lose everything. You can’t even make a decision about what to order in a restaurant.”
The cruelty of the conversion therapy is revisited by Mercer as flashing lights and images appear on a virtual screen. “I was made to sit strapped with electrodes soaked in salt water in a wooden chair in the middle of a room. A large light projected pictures of women. It was supposed to cure me,” recalls Mercer. It is directed by American immersive director Cameron Kostopoulos, whose previous VR work, Body of Mine, placed viewers virtually into the body of another to provide insights into the transgender experience.
“We believe immersive storytelling isn’t just about entertainment—it’s about making the world a better place,” says Kostopoulos, highlighting the political significance of technology and art at a time when US President Donald Trump has targeted the transgender community with a series of executive orders. In the Current of Being had its world premiere at last year’s South by Southwest festival.
Meanwhile, The Exploding Girl is a visceral VR spectacle that probes how violence is pushing people off the edge. It begins: “My name is Candice. For three months, I have been exploding daily.” Candice continues, “We are in a factory of atrocities,” as she confesses to the depression devouring her body. French filmmaking couple Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel—who won the 2014 Berlin Film Festival’s Golden Bear for the Best Short Film for As Long As Shotguns Remain, about a suicidal man trying to protect his brother from harm—builds a testimony to the anger consuming the world in their 18-minute-long VR installation.
Last year, Kolkata-born artist Poulomi Basu’s VR installation, Maya: The Birth of a Superhero, competed in the inaugural Cannes Immersive. Deconstructing the shame and stigma around menstruation, the 33-minute work prompted the viewer to virtually touch a tampon to progress its narrative. Augmented reality production Coloured, the true story of American civil rights activist Claudette Colvin who sparked a revolution in 1955 by refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus, went on to win the Cannes Immersive Prize in the first edition.
This year, the boundaries of reality/art have been further blurred, offering blinding clarity.
The writer is a Delhi-based journalist.
