Latin American film festivals of virtual, augmented, and immersive reality: An overview

Abstract

The surge of techniques of virtual reality applied to cinema carried out an actual revolution for the film industry. Indeed, such features applied to the development of several dimensions of the audiovisual, mainly video games, broadened production, exhibition, and commercial expectations. This phenomenon has not gone unnoticed by film festivals as part of cultural and creative industries. Nonetheless, in Latin America, there are only a few events exclusively devoted to virtual, augmented, 360º, or immersive reality applied to films. By analyzing the film festivals’ official web pages retrieved through the FilmFreeWay database, this paper describes some key features of Latin American film festivals specialized in these areas of visual production. The review shows that such efforts are in their very early stages, in the making, or they have not triggered the interest of the local film industry.