DOES VIRTUAL REALITY TEACH US EMPATHY?

The female perspective in the Czech Republic is still not something taken for granted. This was most recently evident at the Czech Lion Awards ceremony when the director interrupted Daria Kashcheeva's speech about the needs of female filmmakers. The subsequent discussion fully revealed a desperate lack of empathy. How can we convey a different life experience vividly enough so that we can at least momentarily step into someone else's shoes and experience the world with them? One possible way could be virtual reality.

This year's One World festival presents ten immersive film projects in the competition (formerly the virtual reality section), eight of which were directed by women. Five films directly focus on conveying specific female experiences at the heart of their narratives. What some might call a trend also appears as an inherent need to showcase the difficulties women encounter. What better way to truly make someone see than to immerse them completely in a lived experience, seemingly without the possibility of escape, by putting glasses on them?

Without Comfort, Without Life, Without Tears

A different but no less potent concept is offered by the South Korean film "Comfortless." We stroll through the streets of the now abandoned America Town complex in the city of Kunsan. The semi-derelict ghost town is full of bars, casinos, clubs... and Korean women whose task was to "comfort" men.

While we don't see women in the realistic images around us, they are conveyed to us through a suggestive sound track. In it, we hear the revived past: laughter, snippets of conversations, drunken shouts of soldiers, music, clinking glasses. When we look around, we see only deserted houses and movement in the mirror. In its reflection appears a solitary inhabitant of the artificial city, who travels from one environment to another through mirrors.

There's something deeply unsettling about seeing the movements, the dance, the smiles, and the furtive glances of this woman, visually completely detached from the interactions in which she participates in the sound track. The emptiness around her makes one feel the absurdity of the situation in which hundreds of thousands of women found themselves. Similar cities existed throughout South Korea, almost a hundred of them, and they functioned until the 1990s. After the war, American military bases occupied a fifth of the country's habitable land, and half a million women were recruited to provide sexual pleasure to 25 thousand soldiers stationed in Korea annually.

Director Gina Kim wanted to capture the memory of the place before it was demolished and partially erased from history. "Comfortless" (2023) is the culmination of her VR trilogy, following "Bloodless" (2017), about a woman brutally murdered by an American soldier, and "Tearless" (2021), about a center where women with sexually transmitted diseases, acquired from soldiers, were isolated and treated. "Comfortless" and "Bloodless" have also been presented at the International Documentary Film Festival Ji.hlava in the past.

— Excerpt by TEREZA DOMÍNOVÁ, 26 March 2024

This article has been translated from Czech. Please click here for the original source.