What Goes Up // Must Come Down
Category:
immersive
Partner:
Idependent
Type:
Documentary, Virtual Reality, Installation
A Multimedia Exploration of Celebration and Loss
Every Lunar New Year, tourists converge on the Taiwanese village of Pingxi to launch thousands of floating lanterns into the night sky. The lanterns represent the wishes of their owners—and make for one hell of an Instagram post.
But what happens when dawn breaks, the tourists leave, and the thousands of wishes fall out of the sky?
Weaving virtual reality and conventional 2D filmmaking, What Goes Up // Must Come Down fuses two discrete documentaries about the Pingxi Sky Lantern Festival into a singular whole, and suggests that our dreams may have staggering, real-world consequences.
Concept
Create a spiritually confronting installation composed of two parts: a VR experience shot during the Pingxi sky lantern festival, and a cinematic documentary about the woman who gathers the lanterns after they fall.
Roles
Project creators; directors; producers; editors
Results
A collaboration with Taiwan’s FUnique VR, WGU // MCD premiered as the Closing Night Experience of the 2018 New York Film Festival’s Convergence program before going on to its international premiere at HotDocs—and becoming the subject of our visiting artist presentation at Yale’s Center for Collaborative Arts and Media.
