Internationally recognised art and literary critic, writer and cultural producer. Published in ELLE, Glamour, Esquire and Cosmopolitan; member of the Union of Writers.
For decades, the currency of a film festival has been the rectangle. The shape of the screen, the dimensions of the poster, the aspect ratio debated by cinephiles. It has been a flat, two-dimensional world. But on the 15th of October, deep within the architecture of the BFI London Film Festival, that world will begin to curve, to expand, to leak into the physical space its audience occupies. The announcement of the inaugural LFF Expanded Industry Day is a quiet tremor that signals a significant seismic shift. It is the moment a major cultural institution formally acknowledges that the most urgent, challenging, and perhaps most vital storytelling is no longer confined to the frame.
This is not a token gesture. This is a dedicated platform for immersive art, XR, and video games, complete with a Works-in-Progress Showcase, high-level industry talks, and that most crucial of resources: a focused space for creators to connect with the people who can fund their strange new worlds. By placing this event at the heart of its industry programme, the LFF is making a statement. It is asserting that these emergent forms are not a novelty sideshow to the main event of cinema, but a core component of contemporary screen culture. In a sense, the festival is betting on the future by investing in the artists who are currently building it, one line of code and one leap of faith at a time.
Of course, the art world and the gaming industry have had their own thriving ecosystems for years. What makes this different is the context. Placing a VR comedy next to a headline documentary, or a mixed-reality performance alongside a restored cinematic classic, creates a new kind of dialogue. It forces us to reconsider the very definition of what a ‘film festival’ can be. It is a brave and necessary move, an acknowledgment that narrative has broken free of its traditional container.
Blueprints for New Realities
The centrepiece of the day is the Works-in-Progress Showcase, a first look at five UK projects that are still in the process of becoming. This is perhaps the most exciting part of the initiative. It’s a glimpse into the laboratory, a chance to see the thinking behind the finished article. The five selected projects are not just technologically impressive; they are thematically ambitious, each one using its chosen form to ask fundamental questions about embodiment, society, and the nature of experience itself.
Take AMORPHOUS: PLAYING WITH REALITY, from Barry Gene Murphy and May Abdalla of the celebrated studio Anagram. Described as a multiplayer experience that “redefines how we perceive and inhabit our bodies,” it points to a recurring theme in the best immersive work: a deep investigation into the relationship between our physical and virtual selves. In an increasingly disembodied digital culture, this work aims to ground us back in our own skin, even as it transports us to another reality.
This interrogation of the body is given a sharp political edge in CRIPPING UP. Lead artists Meg Fozzard and Amy Crighton use Fozzard’s lived experience as a wheelchair user to directly confront systemic inaccessibility. Crucially, the project challenges the lazy notion of VR as an “empathy machine,” a concept that has often been used to justify shallow, touristic experiences of other people’s lives. Instead, CRIPPING UP promises something more confrontational and authentic, using the interactive nature of the medium to make the user an active participant in a system, not just a passive observer of a struggle.
The satirical potential of the form is explored in MESSIAH, a VR comedy from Kate Cheka and Harry Silverlock. By casting the audience as the Messiah in a world parodying patriarchy and late-stage capitalism, the project uses interactivity to expose absurdity. It’s a fascinating concept that could only work in a medium where the user has agency. It’s one thing to watch a satire; it’s another to be implicated in it.
The showcase also ventures into genre, blending it with social realism. Iain Cunningham’s the BARNS is a narrative game that unfolds as a rural noir, exploring a teenager’s disappearance through multiple perspectives. Cunningham’s background in documentary suggests a story that will be rooted in a powerful sense of place and psychological truth, using the mechanics of a game to deepen the mystery rather than simply decorate it. It feels like a digital evolution of the British folk-horror tradition.
Finally, THE WHALE offers a radical reinterpretation of a classic text. This is not simply Moby Dick in VR. Lead artists Jack Hardiker-Bresson and Sharon Clark are creating a collective, headset-free experience that combines live performance with large-scale projections and spatial sound. Developed with and for D/deaf and hard-of-hearing communities, it fundamentally reimagines who immersive art is for and how it can be experienced. It’s an act of creative and social inclusion that pushes the boundaries of the medium itself.
From Artistic Freedom to Financial Reality
An artist cannot build a world on vision alone. The second half of the LFF Expanded Industry Day is dedicated to the decidedly less glamorous, but utterly essential, business of getting work funded, distributed, and seen. The two industry talks are designed to bridge the gap between creative ambition and market reality, a chasm that has swallowed many promising immersive projects.
The first session, “Creativity Unleashed? Balancing Artistic Freedom and Distribution Requirements,” gets right to the heart of the central tension in this field. With a panel featuring international curators and producers from organisations like Tribeca Immersive and Manchester International Festival, the conversation will tackle the difficult questions. How do you maintain artistic integrity when a commissioner wants a more commercial experience? How do you design for an audience that may have never worn a VR headset before? This is not a theoretical debate; it is a practical discussion about survival in a new and unpredictable market. It is the kind of conversation that will determine whether this art form thrives or remains a niche concern.
The second talk, “Championing Immersive Storytelling,” focuses on the role of the BFI itself. By bringing together the directors of its various funds, the session aims to demystify the funding process for creators. Featuring case studies from BFI-supported artists like Baff Akoto, it provides a tangible roadmap for how an idea can move from a pitch deck to a fully realised project. For the creators in the room, this session is arguably the most important of the day. It represents the institutional support that can turn a fledgling project into a sustainable career.
It’s easy to be cynical about industry events. They can often feel like closed loops of networking and jargon. But the structure of this day – moving from the raw creativity of the showcase to the hard-nosed pragmatism of the funding talks – feels different. It reflects a holistic understanding of what this emerging sector needs: not just a stage, but a support structure. It needs a marketplace, a forum for debate, and a clear path to funding. The LFF, to its credit, is attempting to provide all three. We are witnessing the slow, deliberate construction of an ecosystem, and for the artists working at this frontier, that is everything.
