VR: Shelter

For the second year in a row, De Cinema presents a selection of VR films: experiences that blur the boundaries between the visible and the invisible and invite you to look, feel, and experience in a different way.

Shelter is a virtual reality documentary by filmmaker, historian, and curator Sjors Swierstra (The Incident – Armando and the Myth), co-directed with Ukrainian producer Ivanna Khitsinska (Fortress Mariupol, Simon, Queens of Joy). Khitsinska previously created a gripping documentary series about the soldiers of the besieged Azov regiment in Mariupol. The film was shot on location in Ukraine, including Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, Khmelnytskyy, and near the front line, and also makes use of archival material. The makers take you to the places where Ukrainians seek protection from drones and rockets almost daily: metro stations, basements, and improvised shelters. Underground, life continues — vulnerable, ordinary, and intensely human. You witness quiet conversations between pregnant women in an underground maternity center, a heartbreaking soldiers’ funeral, the tense routine inside a frontline barracks, and a symphony orchestra that continues to play in a basement.

Swierstra started from a recognizable sense of media fatigue: the continuous stream of images can numb us. With this immersive experience, he wants you to feel again what war means when the danger literally hangs above you. Khitsinska hopes the experience will sustain emotional involvement: not only the tragedy, but also the strength of a population that endures. Shelter is explicitly not about destruction, the makers emphasize, but about how people cope with war, how they keep going, caring, waiting, singing, and remaining silent.

Khitsinska: “I hope this VR experience can hold people’s attention on what is happening in Ukraine. That they remain emotionally involved, that they see not only the tragedy but also our strength. Because the shelters do not tell a story of fear, but of a people who refuse to be broken.”