India marked a significant milestone by presenting its inaugural VR film in France. This year, the Cannes Film Festival added a thrilling new category: The Innovative Immersive competition. Festival de Cannes announced eight projects to vie for recognition in the following competition dedicated to showcasing those groundbreaking projects that outshine the conventional boundaries of storytelling through unique immersive technologies such as virtual reality, mixed reality, motion graphics, projection mapping and holographic works.
The first edition of the competition took place from 15th May to 24th May 2024 at the Cannes Cineum and the Université Côte d’Azur, Georges Méliès Campus featuring eight distinctive projects that used these innovative technologies to present their work. Among them was India’s first VR film to compete in the festival, a pioneering work by the Kolkata-based filmmaker Poulomi Basu who is an artist on the one hand and an activist on the other exploring the intersection of art, technology and social commentary through the immersive techniques.
Her work “Maya: The Birth Of A Superhero” ignites the social issues or the so-called shame that comes up when we talk about a woman’s body, reproductive health and menstruation while confronting all the taboos related to it. The work follows a similar graph showing us the perspective of Maya, a young South Asian girl navigating adolescence in London. The arrival of her first period sparks transformation which is not limited to physical changes but an understanding of her own self and her identity as a woman and herself. The movie specifically covers the theme of feminism, sexuality and the societal shame surrounding it while throwing a question to the audience about the sanity of society in making women go through this while Maya’s journey to self-discovery involves her awakening of hidden powers related to womanhood.
Maya has broken the conventional boundaries and taken a step ahead and there awaits a mesmerizing experience that audiences all over the world are yet to take through Poulomi Basu’s work.
