Venice Immersive 2025 awards ‚The Clouds Are 2000 Meters Up,‘ ‚A Long Goodbye,‘ and ‚Less Than 5 Gr of Saffron,‘ cementing its role as XR’s top showcase.
The Grand Prize for Best Immersive Experience at the 82nd Venice Film Festival, went to The Clouds Are 2000 Metres Up, by. The Achievemenet award went to A Long Goodbye. A special jury prize was awarded to Less Than 5 Gr of Saffron.
Venice Immersive is the only major festival program that treats XR on equal footing with film, and its prizes carry symbolic weight. Since its launch in 2017, it has become the premier showcase for virtual and mixed reality, staged on Lazzaretto Vecchio, a small island that once served as a plague quarantine station. This year’s competition featured thirty projects. The festival presents 69 extended-reality projects from 27 countries, including immersive videos, virtual worlds, and installations.
The Clouds Are 2000 Meters Up, directed by Singing Chen, which won the Venice Immersive Grand Prize is single-user, free-roaming VR experience adapts a short story by celebrated Taiwanese author Wu Ming-Yi, guiding users through dreamlike forests and symbolic inner landscapes as a grief-stricken widower seeks a connection to his late wife’s spirit. Live-action videogrammertry is used to dramatic effect as the action plays out in front of us.
A Long Goodbye is a 35-minute animated, interactive VR installation by Kate Voet and Victor Maes, featured in competition in the Venice Immersive section at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival. The experience puts the viewer in the shoes of Ida, a 72-year-old pianist with dementia, revisiting her memories through a gently animated apartment and fragments of her past, such as tape recordings of her husband, Daniel. This tactile, poetic journey explores memory, connection, and love amid the erosion of identity, rendered in a hand-drawn, painterly aesthetic.
Less Than 5 Gr of Saffron, directed by Négar Motevalymeidanshah (France, 2025), is a 7-minute VR experience with no dialogue. It follows Golnaz, a young Iranian immigrant working at a migrant reception center in suburban Berlin. One evening, hungry and facing an empty fridge, she splurges on expensive saffron in a supermarket. Cooking saffron-infused rice, she seeks comfort from her homesickness—but this sensory act unexpectedly unravels traumatic memories of a family tragedy: a ship-drowning that claimed her loved ones three years earlier. The piece humanizes migrant suffering by centering empathy through an intimate, familiar moment.
Of course, the beauty of a festival like Venice is much broader than a mere competition.
