When GIFF asks for “More Cinema Please” it’s because it always has an eye towards the future, where one can see new opportunities to make cinema thanks to the technologies that are being developed in the present. Epicenter GIFF is the platform within the festival dedicated to new technologies so those who attend can have a taste of what the future has in store for cinema. This year, Epicenter offers expositions to live Virtual Reality, a way to tell stories where the spectator can submerge into the world that’s being presented, making one feel like they’re there.
Located in the upper level of Casa Conde Rul, this platform allows you to experiment with Virtual Reality in three ways. In one room you’ll be able to try the Tilt Brush, developed by Google, a VR program that allows the user to create their own virtual space and paint within it. One simply puts on the headset and uses two sticks to manipulate the environment, being either in space or in the snow (among many other possibilities) and different ways of adding color. This same experience can be used to play a video game in which the object is to shoot at dolls that are approaching to attack the user from many different directions, with sticks designed as rifles. This is the first game of this kind to be designed entirely in Mexico.
And finally, the VR Screening Room, where using a headset one can view cinema. This year, the screening room presents a series of VR short films, among which stand out, Welcome to Wacken, Technolust, and The People’s House, in addition the short films from the Ópera Orbis Project by the Guanajuato International Film Festival, in which three of the most prolific Mexican filmmakers made a Virtual Reality short: Carlos Hagerman’s El Beso, Juan Carlos Rulfo’s La Piedra and Roberto Fiesco’s Péplum. To see this proposal for a new kind of Mexican cinema, the space is limited, so register previously and witness to Ópera Orbis, which, like every screening in GIFF, is free of charge.
