Czech filmmaker, journalist and festival programmer Ondřej Moravec’s VR project Darkening is more personal than most, dealing with the subject of debilitating depression and, as importantly, how to cope with it. Producer Hana Blaha Šilarová of Frame Films discusses the work with Business Doc Europe.
One of the unique aspects of Ondřej Moravec’s VR Darkening is that the viewer’s progress during its 20-minute duration will be guided by his or her own voice. Producer Hana Blaha Šilarová tells how, when the director was growing up, voice and sound control was a coping mechanism that he would employ in keeping his depression at bay. Likewise, in the new four-part VR project, pitched at East Doc Platform, audiences get to experience the feelings that people with depressions struggle with, and are challenged to drive these sensations away using the power of vocalisation.
“When he [Moravec] deals with his depression he uses his voice, he likes to sing, hum; even when he was a teenager he went to horseracing and he released his pain and depression by cheering for the horses,” says Šilarová. “We realised that the voice that he uses for releasing can help others as well.”
In the animated Darkening, developed for Oculus Quest, we see the diverse and sometimes abstract images and landscapes that Moravec associates with the depression he has experienced since childhood. The second part of the project will be developed in collaboration with clinical psychologists as a therapeutic tool to enable patients to enter VR to discover and recreate the landscapes. “You rebuild the environment that you see, which means that you can see the positive effect of your voice in the visuals,” comments Šilarová. She adds in her notes for the project that the process could help to “harmonize the psyche.”
The producer underlines the relevance of this project during the pandemic, as increasing millions of people around the world suffer grief, isolation and uncertainty over their future and those of their families and friends. It is reckoned that seven per cent of Europe’s population suffers from the disease, she says, while only a third of these undergo treatment. “We were developing the story and starting the development of the prototype when the pandemic hit,” she adds both of the project’s prescience and ongoing relevance. “Everyone was talking about mental health, taking care of yourself etc, and we realised that this topic will not only be about depression but about wellbeing andanxiety, all these feelings that we felt [last] year and will be feeling now and in the future.”
Šilarová admits to feeling concern that Moravec was exposing his illness, and therefore himself, to the world, in embarking on this project, and she therefore describes him as very brave. “I was trying to somehow warn him that as soon as he comes out with this story, everyone in the world will know that he has depression, which can be very intimate information that you don’t want to share immediately with everyone. We discussed it a lot… He is very brave to say out loud that ‘I have depression’.”
Another unique aspect of the project is the vibrant animation created by Czech Bára Anna Stejskalová, whose short film Love Is Just a Death Away, described as “a tender story about finding love even amid utter decay,” was selected for SXSW 2021 Animated Shorts Competition.
The €320,000 budgeted project has received development support from the Czech Film Fund and Šilarová is hopeful of a thumbs up for further production funding from the organisation. During East Doc Platform she is underlining the obvious international roll-out potential of the project, whose expected release date is September 2022.
