Hof Film Festival shows immersive XR: "Breeding ground for new narrative forms"
Immersive appeal for nature, mouse on burnout, divided German village: Hof Film Festival shows five XR projects.
(Image: Shutterstock.com/thinkhubstudio)
The 59th Hof International Film Festival is once again expanding its programme to include virtual reality and augmented reality. The film festival is specifically focussing on immersive content to make socially relevant topics such as environmental protection, political division, social exclusion and digital identity tangible.
Under the banner "Place to grow", the festival aims to create a breeding ground for new narrative forms and offers a curated mix of national and international projects. Three of the five entries will make their debut at the Venice Film Festival.
Three VR experiences with an international profile
"Out of Nowhere" by Austrian filmmaker Kris Hofmann and co-director Andreas Wuthe premiered at Venice Immersive in August 2025, but is being shown in Hof for the first time in Germany. The ten-minute virtual reality experience explores the consequences of extreme weather conditions based on a woman's memories of the Austrian flood disaster in 2021.
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In the 30-minute VR narrative "La Petite Souris", a French-German-Belgian co-production by Nicolas Bourniquel, an upwardly mobile mouse becomes a tragic figure of identification. The dark Christmas story shows in satirical form how ambition can turn into isolation and what happens when creativity no longer finds a place in a thoroughly rationalised system.
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The emotional centrepiece of the programme is "Eddie and I" by Maya Shekel. In the 30-minute VR experience, users overcome their fear of the unknown together with Ron, who is deaf, without a common language. The VR goggles' hand tracking enables simple gestures and aims to make it possible to experience how non-verbal communication can build trust.
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Experience German history virtually: Mödlareuth VR
The village of Mödlareuth on the border between Bavaria and Thuringia became known as "little Berlin" in the post-war period. The inner-German border ran right through the centre of the village and divided the almost 50 inhabitants between the American and Soviet occupation zones.
In "Mödlareuth VR", the German-German Museum guides visitors through the history of the divided village. After a film introduction, visitors experience a VR tour through eight historical events and everyday situations of the inhabitants of Mödlareuth.
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With the "Filmpeople AR" project by the Leipzig-based Kollektiv17, the festival is adding an interactive augmented reality experience to its programme. People whose faces were scanned last year now meet visitors as digital avatars. They tell personal festival stories in an AR environment and reflect on the Hof Film Festival from different perspectives.
The experiment aims to transfer real experiences into digital space and thus create new narrative approaches. The 59th Hof International Film Festival takes place from 21 to 26 October. Anyone who wants to experience the traditional film festival online has the opportunity to do so until 2 November.
(joe)
