Adoor Gopalakrishnan donned the headset as he prepared himself to watch Right to Pray, India’s first Virtual Reality (VR) film directed by Khushboo Ranka at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2016. At the end of the four-minute film, a curious Gopalakrishnan, one of the most awarded filmmakers in India, turned around and asked the film’s producer Anand Gandhi: “What is the future of VR films?”

Nearly a decade after TIFF became the first major festival to welcome VR films in a special five-film package called POP VR to celebrate the evolution of storytelling through innovative technology, the global entertainment industry has been able to answer many questions around the early skepticism that marked the arrival of immersive cinema, reports Hindustan Times.

At least seven major international film festivals in the world — South by Southwest festival in Texas, Sundance, Tribeca in New York, Venice, Red Sea festival in Jeddah, BFI London Film Festival and Cannes — today have an immersive category in official selection, reflecting the increasing influence of VR on contemporary cinema. Indian filmmakers are among the early practitioners of VR cinema who quickly realised the art’s ability to put people at the centre of a new frontier of perception, technology and creativity.

The Mumbai-based Ranka (co-director of An Insignificant Man)’s Right to Pray, which portrays protests by women against a 450-year-old tradition that denied them entry to a temple in Trimbakeshwar in Maharashtra, was followed by more VR films like Supermen of Malegaon director Faiza Ahmad Khan’s The Cost of Coal, on environmental destruction by coal mining in Korba district of Chhattisgarh, and Caste is Not a Rumour by Naomi Shah and Pourush Turel, that focused on a real-life public flogging of four Dalit boys based on a rumour that they skinned a dead cow.

“Virtual Reality has often been described as the ultimate empathy machine, allowing you to step into the shoes of others. For this reason, VR has been used by many documentary activists and NGOs to highlight social, humanitarian and environmental issues, serving as a powerful tool to embody the experiences of others,” Liz Rosenthal, Curator of the Venice film festival’s Venice Immersive programme, tells Hindustan Times.

If Right to Pray became part of the arrival of VR in the world of cinema eight years ago, the latest international film festival to include a VR category, the Cannes Film Festival, too had an Indian artist, Kolkata-born Poulomi Basu with her VR installation, Maya: The Birth of a Superhero, in its inaugural immersive competition last month.

“Virtual Reality is a powerful tool for dream narratives that bend time and space along with embodiment, which is key,” explains the London-based Basu, who has co-written and co-directed the work with British artist CJ Clarke. A 15-minute version of Basu’s VR work won a Special Jury Award at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York last year. One of the eight VR works in first-ever Cannes Immersive Competition, Maya had its world premiere at the South by Southwest festival in the US last year.