Jury 2025: Three exceptional viewers explore immersive creation
For its 8th edition, NewImages Festival places the immersive experience at the heart of an essential question: what does immersion allow us to experience, if not a genuine encounter with the Other? By inviting us to step outside ourselves, to abandon our bearings and embrace other bodies, other realities, the immersive experience becomes a space of otherness. A shared territory, often fragile, where intimate narratives, collective experiences and reinvented worlds intersect.
To evaluate the 2025 selection for the XR Competition, the festival has assembled a jury to match this artistic and political ambition. Three personalities with diverse backgrounds, each embodying in their own way a commitment to new forms of storytelling and listening: filmmaker Marie Amachoukeli, artist and creative technologist Violeta Ayala, and composer and producer Philippe Cohen Solal.
Three sensibilities, three different visions, but one common ground
This year’s NewImages Festival will bring together works that explore the shifting territories of identity, memory, technology and otherness. To judge these creations from around the world, we’ve assembled a jury that reflects our selection: committed, inventive and in tune with these new immersive narratives.
Marie Amachoukeli: a filmmaker attuned to the senses
Marie Amachoukeli is a multi-award-winning director who, from the outset, has explored intimate narratives, complex identities and raw emotions. In Party Girl, winner of the Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, she gave voice to silences. With Ama Gloria, she films separation from a child’s perspective. But it’s also through immersion that she pushes the limits of narrative: with Hypno, a VR experience conceived with Flavien Berger for the Paris Opera, she explores the power of the collective in a shared sensory space. Her subtle, deeply human outlook makes her an ideal figure for evaluating works where technology becomes a vector of emotion and embodiment.
Philippe Cohen Solal: a composer at the forefront of sound storytelling
An unclassifiable musician and pioneer of cross-fertilization between cultures and formats, Philippe Cohen Solal is also a storyteller. When he co-founded Gotan Project, he invented a hybrid musical grammar between tango and electronics that has conquered the world. Through transmedia projects such as OUTSIDER and his recent albums exploring collective memory (75010), he creates a dialogue between image, text, sound and territory. His path, a blend of sonic innovation, non-linear storytelling and artistic commitment, resonates fully with the ambitions of XR: to open up other sensory, political and poetic worlds.
Violeta Ayala: telling the world with the tools of tomorrow
Violeta Ayala is an Australian-Bolivian filmmaker, technologist and activist who uses immersive technologies to create necessary, uncompromising narratives. The first Quechua member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, she fashions an XR where invisibilized voices take the lead, not the margins.
With Prison X, Las Awichas and Huk, she creates a new language where indigenous futurism, feminist artificial intelligence and collective memory collide and collaborate. Her work includes four award-winning feature-length documentaries: Stolen, The Bolivian Case, Cocaine Prison and La Lucha – films that do more than represent; they move people and politics.
Through this jury, NewImages Festival affirms its determination to defend an XR that is deeply rooted in the issues of our time. An XR that doesn’t just dazzle, but questions, connects and transforms.
Three prizes for immersive excellence
The works in competition will be judged on the basis of three major distinctions: the Grand Prix du Jury, awarded to the best immersive work in all categories; the Prix de l’interactivité, dedicated to the work that most brilliantly exploits the possibilities of public engagement and participation; and finally the Prix de l’impact, which salutes a work that conveys a strong social or political message, and is capable of mobilizing consciences. These prizes, awarded by our jury, embody the diversity of immersive writing, and recognize innovative, embodied and committed artistic approaches.
Discover the selection of XR Competition and Out-of-competition works from April 9 to 13, 2025, at the Forum des images and the canopée des Halles in Paris.
Not yet accredited?
Whether you’re curious to discover new forms of storytelling or passionate about immersive technologies, NewImages Festival 2025 offers a rich and accessible program to explore the future of immersive creation. Come and experience something out of the ordinary!
Discover the full festival program here!