Still: Floating with Spirits

Multi award-winning Colombian/Belgian filmmaker Juanita Onzaga makes her VR debut in the magical realist Floating with Spirits, selected for the Venice Immersive Competition 2023.

In the interactive work, the first such co-production between Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxembourg, two sisters prepare for the Day of the Dead within the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico. As they share stories from the past, laying flowers and lighting incense, they invoke the spirits of their ancestors who appear as swirling clouds of luminescence. The shamanistic dance that each performs is a prelude to a new revelation about Mazatec culture.

“I spent years getting to know the sabedoras (knowledge people) from Mazatec indigenous communities in Oaxaca, México, listening, learning and sharing about their cosmogony and world vision,” explains director Onzaga. “Inspired by their cosmogony, we built this sensorial and poetic ancestral futurism VR experience, to shake our perception of the real, to rewire the ways we connect with nature and the afterlife.”

Dutch co-producer Corine Meijers of Studio Biarritz became familiar with the Oaxaca region while on a hiking holiday. She was then working at the Holland Film Meeting, before moving to Submarine Channel, where she began to cut her teeth in immersive production. 

“I really experienced the mood of the mountains and the forests of Mexico, so when I got to hear about Juanita’s project at CineMart 2020, I immediately felt very close to it because that area is so magical,” she explains to SEE NL. “I wanted to work on it, not only because of the production team [Cassettes for timescape, Belgium] and not only the subject matter, but also because I had such a personal connection to it.”

Meijers oversaw the complex photogrammetry in Mexico, but also supervised the volumetric capture of the spirit dancers within the caves, as defined by their particle cloud systems. The team in the Netherlands was responsible for bringing all the elements together within the game engine Unity and Github.

“Floating with Spirits is Juanita’s first virtual reality project, one that she managed to set up within a 3-way construction, with companies in Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, which is not always easy, I think, especially if it's your first time,” says Meijers (who also presents Steye Hallema’s The Imaginary Friend in Venice Immersive, as well as Iris van der Meule’s Gay Simulator in Venice Production Bridge). “Structuring it as a co-production is what made it all possible, because you can have different teams with different types of expertise and experience, and a larger budget.”

“This might be the first Benelux co-production in virtual reality, but it's not going to be the last,” the Dutch VR doyenne signs off.

Floating with Spirits is written and directed by Juanita Onzaga. It is produced by Cassette for TImescapes (BE) in co-production with Studio Biarritz (NL) and Tarantula (LUX). The VR film received support from VAF, the Netherlands Film Fund and Film Fund Luxembourg.