Artou — Abderrahmane Sissako

Six siblings carry their father from Europe back to a village in Mauritania, because on the eve of his death he asked to be buried beside his own father. That is the whole of Artou, and Sissako gives it twenty-seven minutes of virtual reality in Fulani and English, with Nadia Ben Rachid, who cut Timbuktu and Bamako, among the three editors and Armand Amar on the score. It is in competition at Venice Immersive, which turns ten this year and runs on Lazzaretto Vecchio, a plague-quarantine island in the lagoon. Sissako says seeing work in that section is what turned him toward the form, and that the urgency was opening the continent to immersive making rather than picking up a gadget. Omar Sy's Korokoro produces alongside Dune Vision in Nouakchott and a_BAHN in Luxembourg, with France Télévisions and Media City Qatar; Sy voices it. Almost everything else in the section this year is a franchise, a nature spectacle or a tribute. This is a burial at walking pace, in a language most of the audience does not speak. Come back in December and see whether anyone can watch it outside a festival.