Swiss filmmakers take on virtual reality to draw viewers into ecstasy and exile
Viewers dance at a night-time rave or float through Paris with an asylum-seeker in two new virtual reality (VR) films by Swiss directors - their first forays into VR. Domenico Singha Pedroli and Patrick Muroni ask what cinema becomes when audiences no longer watch from a distance but step inside the story.
Virtual reality is not simply a new technology but a new way of experiencing cinema. Across film festivals and art spaces, directors who once composed images for the flat frame are now shaping entire worlds. In this new terrain, the traditional distance between spectator and subject collapses: the audience enters the narrative rather than observes.
This transformation is at the heart of Art*VR, the annual festival dedicated to immersive storytelling, which in October celebrated its third edition at the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague. Spanning several floors and featuring international competitions and thematic sections such as More-than-Human Perspectives (exploring the viewpoints of nature and AI) and AsteRisk* (human rights), the event offers a panoramic view of how artists are redefining the moving image for the headset era.
The museum’s white surfaces, which usually display art, are now bare. Scattered sparsely across the space, a few silent visitors wearing headsets sit or lie within small marked areas: a chair, a carpet, a plexiglass cube. The gallery, once designed for collective viewing, has become a centre for private experiences, each participant enclosed within their own invisible screen.
Within this constellation of solitary viewers, the works of the Swiss-Thai director Domenico Singha Pedroli and the Swiss-French director Patrick Muroni come to life. Both known for poetic, introspective cinema, their first forays into VR, Another Place and Rave, extend their artistic preoccupations into immersive form. Rather than treating VR as novelty, they use it as a continuation of their central question: how can film make us feel proximity – not only through the eye, but through the body?
Architecture and colonial maps
For Pedroli, who originally studied architecture, these questions have revolved around exile, colonial traces and memory. His earlier documentary, Au Revoir Siam, which premiered in 2024 at Visions du Réel, a film festival that takes place in the Swiss city of Nyon, mapped the experiences of Thai political refugees in France, layering archival maps and photographs from the Bibliothèque nationale de France with contemporary images of everyday refugee life.
“Architecture taught me how to shape and transform the experience of time and space within a particular cultural context,” he says. “When I started working with moving images, I carried that intention with me, but with a much deeper awareness of the human subjects I was engaging with.”
In Au Revoir Siam, he employed a split-screen format, presenting two images side by side, to show the coexistence of overlapping temporalities: the colonial past and the present, the lives of Thai political refugees in Paris, and ongoing life in Bangkok. This visual structure is interwoven with more experimental imagery, such as shots of murky water.
“Throwing the camera into the river was an artistic gesture – to say that the colonial borders they drew don’t really exist there,” he explains. “In water, there is no separation, no line, no land. Only continuity.”
Floating between worlds
If Au Revoir Siam positioned the spectator as a witness, Pedroli’s new VR piece, Another Place, makes the viewer the protagonist. Here, the dissolution of boundaries becomes literal: the spectator floats through Paris and Bangkok. We step into the shoes of Renée, a young Thai trans woman exiled after an ill-fated Facebook post who is now waiting for her asylum papers in France.
“For me it wasn’t about dissecting her experience, but about creating a space for the audience to inhabit her perspective, to feel her disconnection from the world,” Pedroli explains.
Renée wanders through an unfamiliar Paris, a city haunted by fragments of Bangkok, two temporalities colliding. Plastic stools, street chairs and piles of construction dirt litter the pavements, unsettling any sense of geography. The surrounding architecture mirrors this estrangement: a single Parisian façade repeats endlessly, creating a looping, disorienting environment.
“What began as a technical choice [repeating the same building] became an aesthetic one,” Pedroli says. “The uniformity started to feel suffocating, almost absurd. It reflects Haussmann’s ideal of architectural unity, but here it turns into something alienating.”
The scenery in Another Place was entirely constructed in 3D within a VR environment, based on Renée’s stories and photographs. Within the piece, the only elements that remain “real” are the audio. Renée’s voice guides the viewer through this liminal space, recounting her experiences, thoughts and emotions as she floats, disconnected from her surroundings. The narrative meanders, like Renée herself, open to interpretation and shaped by the viewer’s discretion, punctuated by recurring calls to OFPRA, the French asylum agency, where the only response is an answering machine.
Dancing in the dark
Where Another Place explores exile through space, Muroni’s Rave extends his ongoing fascination with how the night offers youth a realm of freedom. It is a timeless space liberated from the demands of productivity.
“For me,” he says, “the night is a space of liberty, away from the constraints of the day. When I was a teenager, the night became a space where anything could happen.”
In his earlier films Un matin d’été and Les Sentinelles, Muroni captured the fleeting moments of post-party dawns and casual hangouts: friends drifting through streets or wandering in forests, suspended between exhaustion and revelation.
In Rave, the story unfolds from the anticipation and gathering before the event, through occasional drug use, and the journey through the forest, until finally reaching the rave itself.
Muroni grew up in a small rural village in Haute-Savoie, France, and his conception of the rave reflects that upbringing: intimate gatherings in the woods, rather than the large-scale Burning Man-style events often associated with rave culture. The project emerged from a personal desire to make this world universally accessible and emotionally legible.
The paradox of being alone inside a headset yet sensing a collective presence became the conceptual core of Rave. “I wanted participants not to remain in contemplation but to be in movement,” Muroni says. “Even alone, with only the music as a guide, they start to dance.”
If Pedroli uses VR to dissolve distance, Muroni uses it to simulate proximity and reconstruct the ecstatic collectivity of the rave within the intimacy of the headset.
Placed side by side, Another Place and Rave add a new dimension to cinema: the challenge of representing lived experience as a 3D space. In traditional film, the frame is fixed, a single video that everyone watches yet interprets differently. In VR, one story unfolds, but the perspectives are limitless within the 360° view. These works suggest that cinema, far from ending with the headset, might instead be rediscovered there – not as something we watch, but as something we enter.
Edited by Catherine Hickley/ts
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