Klaxon. My Dear Sweet Friend

360 VR film with interactive elements

Chapter One - 33 min

Chapter Two - 30 min

Appendix - 12 min

Key collaborators

Created by

Nikita Shokhov, Anna Evtiugina

Screenplay and poetry by

J. William Howe, Jaeda Mason, Fiona Rae Brunner

Lead cast

Pearl Bedford, Heidi Dorris, Jaeda Mason, Fiona Rae Brunner, Antonette L McCaster, Greta Lind, Jasmine Sugar, Kate Swanson

Post-production

Turner Roth - editor

Anna Libbie Grossman - UX programmer and ambisonics sound mixer

Judy Kim - sound designer

Music

Dominique Fils-Aimé

Lead advisor

Gabrielle Civil

Institutions

The Watermill Center, Indiana University, CalArts, Virginia Tech

2021

Full credits list

A laboratory of poetic understanding of whiteness and the double consciousness of black people in the United States

360 VR film with interactive elements, a poetic journey through the intimate world of memories and thoughts of a woman, going through several stages of her life and her different selves.

The audience puts on a VR headset and enters the intimate world of memories and thoughts of a woman. The experience is a journey through the mind and lifetime of the protagonist. This immersive story bridges cinematic and theatre experiences and employs gaze-interactive visual poetry. 

The visual narrative unfolds in the subconscious state between dream and wake. In her childhood, she meets a girl, and they become close friends, but the girl suddenly disappears. This event dramatically affects the protagonist's life: she cannot escape the fantasies about her friend. Later, she moved to a big city to model for painters and had a successful career as an artist. However, getting older, she still struggles with obsessive ideas about her childhood friend. Eventually, she realizes that the stress of experiencing society's oppression at a young age forced her to extinguish her black identity to be accepted by an oppressive society. Therefore, a viewer contemplates the woman's life-long process of becoming.

This project, initiated by US-based artists born in Russia, addresses contemporary white immigrants in the United States. To reveal the harmful impacts of white supremacy on the consciousness level, creators draw from their research on US history, intersectionality, consciousness studies, and in-depth interviews conducted with black studies scholars, artists, and community members.