Great Hoax: The Moon Landing arrives on Viveport this September as part of the Venice Film Festival.
This September marks the start of the 77th annual Venice Film Festival in Lido di Venezia, Italy. While a “more restrained” version of the main event is scheduled to proceed on-site, Venice VR Expanded, a portion of the festival dedicated entirely to VR-based projects, will this year be held online due to ongoing concerns over COVID-19.
From September 2nd to the 12th, viewers can log into Viveport to access a variety of festival selections. This includes Serendipity’s Great Hoax: The Moon Landing, a satirical VR comedy that has players faking a moon landing for the Taiwanese government in the hopes of “making the country rich again.”
“Audience members will be able to interact with characters and objects in the film, through interactive 6DOF (6 degrees-of-freedom) VR technology, as they spearhead the “journey” to the “moon,” said Producer Adam Cullen Young in an official release.
In this interactive short, viewers step into the shoes of a lowly actor cast as the first Taiwanese astronaut to “visit” the moon. As players film their historic “landing,” they’ll be tasked with following the instructions of an overzealous director in charge of this Stanley Kubrick-esque conspiracy.
“I never dared to think that when we started this project, we could be selected for such an important international film festival like Venice, so it feels very surreal to learn the news of our selection,” said Director John Hsu (Your Spiritual Temple Sucks).
“For the team, this is the first time that we have conducted such a complex, cross-cultural co- production and the content we set about to make for this project is new territory for me. Everyone on the crew has been tortured by me for more than a year, so when their efforts are rewarded like this, I feel very happy.”
“Last year (2019) coincided with the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing,” added Producer Estela Valdivieso Chen.
“So, Taiwan Public Television took this as an opportunity to finance our project that has such a satirical twist about such a monumental event, and together with the Kaohsiung Film Archive as financiers, we collaborated on the artwork and programming with 3DAR, an Argentine animation company.”
Great Hoax: The Moon Landing will be available for viewing September 2nd to the 12th via Viveport. The project was also selected as a participant at the 2019 Venice Production Bridge and is scheduled for exhibition at Festival NewImages in Paris this September.
Image Credit: Serendipity
