Venice Immersive 2025: Two Projects in Competition

From 27 August to 6 September 2025 the 82nd Venice International Film Festival ran on the Lido di Venezia. Two projects I did the sound for were in the Venice Immersive programme.

Venice Immersive is the XR section of the festival and sits on its own island, the Isola del Lazzaretto Vecchio, reachable only by shuttle boat. The 2025 competition had 30 immersive projects, plus Biennale College, Best of Experiences and Best of Worlds out of competition.

The two projects

Eddie and I by Maya Shekel ran in the Competition. You play Eddie, a soft fantasy creature, and meet Ron, a deaf boy. There is no spoken language between you. Handtracking lets you learn signs, and the sound has to carry the closeness that words would otherwise do. Alongside the spatial mix there is composed music.

The Sad Story of the Little Mouse Who Wanted to Become Somebody is a dark Christmas fable in deceptively cute VR. It is 3D animation, which means there is no production sound at all. Every step, every squeak, every note was built from scratch.

What I actually heard there

The red carpet part of a festival is easy to describe. The interesting part for me was putting on the headphones at thirty-odd stations in a row.

A lot of projects looked remarkable and ran in stereo. No spatial mix, no reason for the picture to be 360 degrees. One of them was sold as a musical experience. At another station an assistant put the headphones on me herself, backwards. If that happens to me with a press badge, I would guess a good share of visitors wore them the wrong way round all day, which quietly cancels any spatial mix underneath. Some Apple Vision Pro demos ran without headphones at all.

That is not a technology problem. Every one of those pieces had the budget and the team to do it properly. Sound simply was not part of the plan early enough, and by the time it is a hardware question at the door, it is far too late.

Why this matters for immersive work

An XR piece is one of the few formats where the audience cannot look away from the sound. They can turn their head away from any part of the picture, but the mix follows them. That is exactly why it deserves a place in the schedule and the budget from week one, not a slot at the end.

More on how I approach that: sound for immersive productions.