REVIEW: BFI LFF EXPANDED
Cults in Shipping Containers and Tilda Swinton Narrated Interactive, Mixed Reality ADHD Documentaries
I’ve accidentally joined a murderous cult and Tilda Swinton has climbed inside my head for a powerful exploration of ADHD, and it’s not even midday.
I’m at the launch of BFI London Film Festival’s Expanded, this year’s bulging programme of immersive art and extended reality, celebrating the moving image in its many forms.
I’m strapped into my VR headset and controllers to start with the extraordinary Impulse: Playing with Reality.
With soothing narration from Swinton, this mixed reality, interactive documentary captures what it means to be neurodivergent in a radical new way, which stays with me for long afterwards.
Swinton sets the tone by giving me challenges, hoovering up a wall of kaleidoscopic shapes and using them to process tasks and information at increasing speeds, with assorted distractions, allowing me to feel the chaos and anxiety sometimes experienced with ADHD.
An extraordinary, interactive documentary follows, using the real voices of people with ADHD telling their powerful stories, while animations of their experiences explode around me.
I watch buildings erupt from the ground and characters teeter on the tops, contemplating suicide. Then I find myself on the top of buildings which get higher, the closer to the edge I move, while Tilda says: “Vertigo isn’t a fear of heights, it’s the fear that we might jump.”
Powerful quotes from each, moving story are sucked up with my controller and I place them on floors and walls around me.
This intimate and fully immersive way of absorbing these stories is incredibly moving, and at the end, there is a room filled with slides and facts about ADHD, to decompress in.
Things get even more intense in the festival’s ARCADE installation, a shipping container, housing a particularly dark, choose your own adventure experience.
We’re led inside, to rows of vintage arcade machines, and warned that we will be in complete darkness for 25 minutes.
Headsets are donned, coins appear for us to pop in the slots and pitch blackness envelops us, while eerie voices whisper and shout so convincingly, I instinctively put my hand out to feel if somebody is behind.
We’re invited to become avatars, which are conscious of our/their actions, answering questions using a button which change the path of our journey - do I head to a war-torn world, seek peace or join a cult?
There's a vulnerability in the darkness, coupled with the dark audio and sensory effects - like the wet of blood splattering our faces - which adds to the cloying and intentionally unsettling experience. It’s an original and compelling installation, and there’s palpable relief when the game ends and the lights come back up.
These are our highlights, but Expanded has a gaggle of events and experiences, including a free gaming lounge and free, virtual dance and AI simulation, merging ethereal dancers and transhumance species, in the BFI IMAX foyer.
LFF Expanded is presented across multiple central London venues, including Bargehouse at Oxo Tower Wharf, BFI IMAX, BFI Southbank, Royal Festival Hall and Outernet London. Ticket prices vary. 11-27 October
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