Coral: Rekindling Venus to screen at Sundance
Australian feature project, Coral: Rekindling Venus has been selected to screen at the Sundance Film Festival.
The annoucement:
The feature project Coral: Rekindling Venus, written and directed by Australian installation artist Lynette Wallworth and produced by John Maynard, has been selected to screen at the Sundance Film Festival.
Coral: Rekindling Venus, an immersive fulldome film experience, has been produced to screen exclusively in fulldome cinemas and planetariums. The film project has been selected to screen in Sundance’s New Frontier program, which celebrates experimental and innovative screen work. New Frontier will also be showcasing Rekindling Venus: In Plain Sight, the companion work to Coral: Rekindling Venus. Screen Australia is the principal investor in both projects.
Screen Australia’s Head of Marketing Kathleen Drumm said, “Coral: Rekindling Venus is a groundbreaking Australian film project and it’s great that Sundance, one of the most prestigious film festivals in the world, is able to screen this as a full immersive experience.”
Lynette Wallworth spent the last five years developing this project, an immersive, kaleidoscopic journey through the glowing underwater coral cities of Australia, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia.
Featuring cinematography from Emmy® Award–winner David Hannan and a soundtrack featuring specially recorded songs from Antony (of Antony and the Johnsons), film composer Max Richter and Gurrumul, Coral: Rekindling Venus is a unique cinematic experience that reveals to the audience a complex community living in the oceans most threatened by climate change.
As the film is intended for fulldome digital planetariums, it will screen in a portable fulldome cinema in Park City and at the Clark Planetarium in Salt Lake City as part of the festival before rolling out, day and date with the festival, in approximately 20 planetariums across the six time zones of the US through the Sundance USA program.
Rekindling Venus: In Plain Sight, devised by Lynette Wallworth and produced by Sue Maslin, is an Augmented Reality (AR) application that opens a virtual porthole to coral reefs around the world. Audiences access the work through a set of seven coral posters that open to a series of 3D fluorescing corals when activated by the app on smart phones. The app provides an update on sea surface temperatures for the world’s threatened coral reefs and is designed to give viewers of the Coral: Rekindling Venus film a means of staying connected to what is happening on the world’s reef. The posters will be downloadable from www.coralrekindlingvenus.com.
Lynette Wallworth will be attending the festival.
More film selections are expected to be announced soon.
The Sundance Film Festival will take place 17–27 January 2013.
www.sundance.org/festival
Source: Screen Australia press release
