VR Documentary Bests Competitors in Festival's Inaugural VR Competition Category
Gina KIM’s VR documentary film
Bloodless won the Best VR Film Award at the 58th Thessaloniki International Film Festival which ran from November 2 to 12 in Thessaloniki, Greece.
Bloodless is a 12-minute documentary about the brutal murder of a South Korean female sex worker by a US Army soldier. The film gives audiences a 360 degree perspective of the victim’s final moments as she wanders the streets of the army-base town of Dongducheon.
Bloodless was one of 10 films contending for the best VR Film award, which was newly created this year, and carried a purse of 3,000 euros. The special international jury that awarded the prize described
Bloodless as “a fearless and uncompromising work, making extraordinary use of VR to create a fully immersive experience tackling a political situation, an innovative, original and starkly atmospheric film”.
This is not the first festival award for
Bloodless. Earlier this year, the film received the Best VR Story Award at the 74th Venice International Film Festival.
KIM, whose most recent works include
Final Recipe (2014) and
Faces of Seoul (2009), is a graduate of Seoul National University and the California Institute of the Arts and is currently a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in the School of Film, Broadcasting and Digital Media.