LONDON.- The 67th BFI London Film Festival (4 – 15 October) in partnership with American Express is excited to announce the line-up for LFF Expanded, the Festival’s programme of Immersive Art and Extended Realities, running from 6 – 22 October 2023. The BFI London Film Festival celebrates the moving image in all its forms – from shorts and features to television and immersive – and LFF Expanded invites audience to explore and experience these powerful new ways of telling stories on screen.

Featuring British and international artists, filmmakers and creative teams, such as Shirin Neshat, Tania de Montaigne, Bjarne Melgaard, Karen Palmer, Darren Emerson and Anagram, this year’s programme offers audiences a huge diversity of approaches to storytelling at the cutting edge of screen technology. Across the programme, curated by the BFI London Film Festival’s XR and Immersive Programme Lead, Ulrich Schrauth, audiences are invited to let their curiosity reign supreme and go beyond the limits of their imagination.

The Festival is pleased to announce a major new main venue for LFF Expanded, Bargehouse at OXO Tower Wharf. This exciting and welcoming space in the heart of the cultural hub of the South Bank will play host to 9 projects, with another free work also being showcased at the nearby Gallery@Oxo; both venues are part of the Coin Street social enterprise, in the thriving local South Bank community. There will also be two free augmented reality walks in the heart of London, one which takes audiences on a local stroll along the Thames, between LFF venues Bargehouse and BFI Southbank, and one through the world-famous Trafalgar Square and the surrounding areas. Additional projects will appear at cultural hotspot Outernet London – the largest digital exhibition space in Europe, with floor to ceiling, 360-degree screens across its four-storey building – and Science Gallery London, which will be home to a groundbreaking audiovisual spectacle.

Encouraged to contemplate imagination, inner worlds and the question of illusion and reality, viewers will venture into an extraordinary visual universe by Bjarne Melgaard in My Trip 2023; presented as a fully immersive multi-screen installation at Outernet, it questions how we choose to live – exploring the never-ending flow of information that is consumed daily through a striking visualisation of a psychedelic experience. My Trip 2023 will screen at Outernet every Monday evening from 16 October – 27 November.

The programme at Bargehouse features the extraordinary Virtual Reality adventure The Imaginary Friend, in which you become the titular friend to Daniel, helping him fight demons and overcome grief – using state-of-the-art holographic filmmaking techniques, this mind-bending ride through the human psyche will move and enthral. Dive into Forager, the highly sensory VR experience that transports participants into the rich and fascinating world of fungi. Making stimulating use of sight, sound, touch and scent, this documentary explores the life cycle of fungi: from spores, mycelium and fruiting body to the inevitable states of decay. Flow, an adaptation of Adriaan Lokman's award-winning 3D short film, immerses users in a painted world entirely composed of air, where a woman’s reality is altered by invisible elements.

The programme will also present powerful real-life experiences that take audiences to the heart of both the current news agenda, and seminal moments in history. In Colored, a new immersive experience based on the book by Tania de Montaigne, join fifteen-year-old trailblazing Civil Rights activist Claudette Colvin, who fought segregation laws in 1950s America. Follow a trail of Banksy murals to the frontlines of the war in Ukraine in the arresting and poignant Murals. In The Fury viewers are taken through the trauma and emotional turmoil a female protagonist must endure during political imprisonment in Iran, while VR documentary Letters From Drancy accompanies a child on the run during the Holocaust.

The 2023 programme also questions the role of technology itself, the power of AI and what our society might look like in the future. Transporting audiences on a unique quest to discover what could happen if we succumb to unchecked surveillance, Karen Palmer’s award-winning Consensus Gentium integrates cutting-edge facial detection and AI. Supported by the BFI Filmmaking Fund, awarding National Lottery funding, this timely and powerful work won the South by Southwest 2023 Award for Innovation XR Experience, and is not to be missed. Things Fall Apart: a musical installation in Mixed Reality transforms W.B. Yeats’ 1919 poem The Second Coming into an artistic exploration of music, poetry and visual landscapes, with innovative use of spatial VR technology and AI-generated imagery transporting viewers to a virtual art gallery.

Venturing out into the city, there is also the opportunity to explore London as you’ve never seen it before, with two free augmented reality walks. Experienced through your smartphone, Ghosts of Solid Air is an augmented reality walk through Trafalgar Square and the surrounding areas which invites audiences to meet key historical figures during periods of civil unrest. Specially adapted for the festival, Fleeting Figures takes you on a stroll along the South Bank connecting two of the LFF’s venues, BFI Southbank and Bargehouse, with digital manifestations of public art.

Combining gaming and Carnatic electronic music, Elsewhere in India transports audiences to India, 2079 for an audiovisual electronica performance about a future world where global cultures are nearing extinction and exploring the theme of 'AI for Cultural Good'. Presented by Science Gallery London at King’s College London and featuring digital avatars of visionary artists Murthovic and Thiruda, this groundbreaking audiovisual spectacle showcases immersive 3D worlds, generative AI art and rare moving images from the BFI National Archive’s India on Film collection.

Back this year by popular demand, Guy Maddin’s augmented reality installation, HAUNTED HOTEL – a melodrama in augmented reality, which was commissioned by the BFI and premiered at last year’s BFI London Film Festival, enfolds the audience in surreal paper worlds, filled with longing, hysteria and madness. All set to an intricate soundscape by acclaimed composer Magnus Fiennes, the piece will be on show, for free, at Gallery@Oxo from 4 – 9 October.

The BFI London Film Festival is the UK’s foremost celebration of screen culture that invites audiences to engage with the finest filmmaking talents from our shores and around the world. Each year, the Festival presents a compelling programme of more than 200 features, shorts, Series and XR works to audiences at venues across London, while a selection of the films also screen at partner cinemas across the UK.