Carne y Arena review – dazzling virtual reality exhibit offers a fresh look at the refugee crisis – The Guardian

So the envelope is pushed a little further, the limits of cinema questioned a little harder, the rectangular perimeter fence of the movie screen challenged a little bit more confidently.

The Cannes Film Festival has officially selected this immersive and sensually rather amazing VR experience, lasting six or seven minutes, directed by Alejandro Gonzlez Irritu and shot by Emmanuel Lubezki. It is certainly far more interesting, far more alive to the creative and responsive possibilities of the medium, than the rather tame VR experience at last years Venice Film Festival: a dainty, Sunday-school retelling of the life of Jesus.

The Jesus show had undoubted novelty and a sort of earnest high-mindedness and as a VR virgin I enjoyed it. But Carne y Arena (Flesh and Sand) is on a whole different level a dynamic, kinetic experience in which the audience can roam freely about, looking up and down, and around a 360 degree circle.

It takes as its subject immigrants and refugees who have come up through Central America and Mexico, attempting to enter the United States based on first-hand interviews and research.

The experience plunges you into the disorientating and even terrifying situation. You walk into what is effectively an aircraft hangar shed: the installation has been set up at Cannes-Mandelieu airport, twenty minutes drive out from the centre. You take your shoes and socks off in a side room with other peoples boots and shoes littered about, and walk through into a space the size of a tennis court, covered in sand. The VR goggles go on, and you find yourself in a vast, baking scrubland on the US-Mexico border, as scared and hungry refugees trudge up to you over the horizon. Then a helicopter and two SUVs from border patrol show up full of cops with guns who aggressively arrest everyone, all around you.

Night falls and there is a hallucinatory sequence showing refugees being tipped out of a boat. Then things become scarier still. Just when you had become used to wandering up to imaginary cops with their very real-looking semi-automatics, and nervously accustomed yourself to the fact that all their movements are choreographed and that you are to them effectively a ghost, invisible you realise that the software of this exhibition has tracked your position and eyeline. These cops can and do get in your face.

Its a theatrical triumph. Does it tell us or show us anything meaningful about the refugee issue? Or is it a posh version of the Harrier jump-jet flight simulators at the RAF museum? At first, I was suspicious. It could be a fetishisation or even eroticisation of the refugees suffering sponsored as it is by Prada. But it does tell you one real thing: what it feels like to have a gun pointed at you. For the first time, I had an inkling of what it must be like. You become lowered, lessened you become subhuman, without even a criminals civilian rights. And anyone experiencing this installation can see that this offers only a fraction of what is happening in real life. The good faith of Irritu is plain.

As for whether it really tests the boundaries of cinema thats unproven. Only one person at a time can play. Promenade theatre arguably offers more. And this installation is in fact likely to be comfortably absorbed into the existing world of art galleries, not movie theatres a species of video art that is already well understood. But that is not to downplay the interest of Carne y Arena, and the new and experimental thinking it offers. Innovation is always welcome and necessary.

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Carne y Arena review - dazzling virtual reality exhibit offers a fresh look at the refugee crisis - The Guardian