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‘Zikr’ brings transcendental Sufi dancing to VR
Director Gabo Arora has spent the past few years promoting virtual reality as the ideal medium for evoking empathy. He spearheaded the UN's VR app, which featured two of his films, Clouds Over Sidra and My Mother's Wing. Now, with Zikr: A Sufi Revival, his new VR experience debuting at the New Frontier exhibition at Sundance today, he's also hoping to help people work through their own ingrained biases against Muslims -- just as he did. Having grown up in a Hindu family that was forced to flee Pakistan when it gained independence, Arora admits that he picked up plenty of negative ideas about Islam and its followers. But after visiting Sufi shrines in India and learning about that Islamic sect's inclusive musical rituals, he was able to outgrow his intolerance. With this VR film, Arora says, he's also aiming to give viewers a sense of the transcendental nature of Sufi practices.
The United Nations is turning VR into a tool for social change
Virtual reality is lauded as an empathy generator. The ability to transport viewers to a setting that would otherwise be inaccessible, or even unfathomable, lends a sense of poignancy to the medium. Over the last two years, journalistic stories and charitable causes have been translated into VR films to raise awareness. In particular, the United Nations Virtual Reality initiative has been using the medium as an advocacy tool for vulnerable communities across the world. And now with the recent launch of a mobile app that introduces a "take action" button for the viewers to engage with the social issues, UNVR is looking to convert compassion into action. The app, led by Gabo Arora, the UN creative director who spearheads the organization's VR productions, will host experiences like Clouds Over Sidra, which places viewers alongside a 12-year-old girl in a Syrian refugee camp; Waves of Grace, which brings them into the world of an Ebola survivor in Liberia; and My Mother's Wing, which takes them to a home in Gaza, where a mother lost her two young sons in the bombing of the UNRWA school.
