Cannes Film Festival 2025: "When I discovered this immersive world, I told myself that the beginnings of cinema must have been like this," confides Tania de Montaigne, juror of the Immersive Competition

The author walked the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival as a member of the jury for the second edition of the immersive competition, winning the first edition with "Noire." A look back at the Croisette to explore her dual experience as a juror and winner.

For the first edition of this new competition at the Cannes Film Festival, Noire , created by Tania de Montaigne, Stéphane Foenkinos and Pierre-Alain Giraud, received the 2024 award for Best Immersive Work, which recognizes works in virtual reality, augmented reality, video projection and holography.

The author was once again on the Croisette, this time as a member of a jury chaired by French director Luc Jacquet, alongside director and musician Laurie Anderson, British screenwriter Martha Fiennes, and Japanese video game designer Tetsuya Mizuguchi. The jury for this second edition awarded the Best Immersive Work prize on May 22nd to From Dust , an opera created by Michel van der Aa. Interview with Tania de Montaigne.

Franceinfo Culture: You were a juror this year for the second edition of the Immersive Competition organized by the Cannes Film Festival after being a winner of the very first edition with Stéphane Foenkinos and Pierre-Alain Giraud. How did you experience this new experience? Tania de Montaigne: I've already had this type of experience as a writer: winning an award and being a juror the following year. This feeling of giving back what you received is fantastic. Furthermore, like immersive film, the jury is made up of people who come from very different backgrounds. No one looks at the same thing when you see the works. What's interesting is how someone who comes from a music background, like Laurie Anderson, or from video games like Tetsuya Mizuguchi, or even from cinema, perceives a work. The dialogues are very rich.

Practically speaking, what did you do as a juror for this Immersive Competition? I saw the nine experiences over two days. Then, on Thursday morning, [the winners were announced late afternoon on May 22] we deliberated. Since the Cannes Film Festival is quite formal, we did it in a specific location. We arrived at 9 a.m. and had to find our work four hours later.

Did this awards ceremony bring back memories of last year when you found out that "Noire" had won the prize? We couldn't all stay for two weeks last year. Stéphane and I had left Cannes because we had a play to direct in Rennes. We knew the announcement would be made on Thursday at 5 p.m., and from Rennes, it would have been complicated to return to Cannes. So we decided to go to Paris to find out the winners and go down to Cannes if we ever won the prize. I told myself it would be too sad not to savor the moment if we ever had it because it was a first. It was Pierre-Alain who announced the good news to us in the afternoon. He was with our Taiwanese producers, who were there when the prize was announced in Cannes. Stéphane and I joined them in the evening for the red carpet. It was beautiful.

Has there been any change between these first two editions? Everything was new for the first edition. No one knew what it was. The works weren't screened in the center of Cannes at all, but at La Bocca, at the Cineum, which is a great venue. Even though it's only 20 minutes away, people's schedules are such that they had to set aside half a day to see works that last between 25 and 40 minutes. This year, we've changed scale, and that means competition is becoming more intense. For this second edition, the works are at the Carlton. People can go and discover them more easily, and the audience is expanding. Immersive works are no longer separate because festival-goers can see them between two films.

Did winning the prize in this Immersive Competition change anything in the life of "Noire"? Our team is very special because the story of the project is. It's a book [ Noire, the unknown life of Claudette Colvin (Grasset)] that became a play and then an immersive experience. The team for the immersive experience is the same as the team for the play. This means that we think in "live performance" mode, hence the importance of the scenography for us. In addition, the fact of having created Noire at Beaubourg is completely out of the ordinary because we knew nothing about the museum dynamic. We invented something that was unprecedented for the Centre Pompidou itself [the immersive augmented reality experience was created there in April 2023]. Beaubourg is already a driving force. Added to this is the selection, also in 2023, at the Tribeca Film Festival, and that at the BFI London Film Festival. I didn't even know that film festivals had immersive categories. Winning the Best Immersive Work award, Cannes crystallized a dynamic because it's one of the biggest film festivals. Other people became interested in the project. This forced us, for example, to find a place to install the demo. It's in a studio in Charenton [Paris region].

Where can the public discover "Noire" again? We'll be at the Avignon Festival this year, and it's fantastic. We'd love to be able to come back to Paris and find a venue where the work could be installed for two months so people can come and see it, like in Montreal, where we presented it for three months at the PHI Center, one of the few museums in the world entirely dedicated to immersive experiences. We stayed at Beaubourg for a little over a month, and it was sold out after the first week.

Since the fall, after spending a lot of time abroad, we've been touring throughout France, visiting theaters, some of which had performed the play. This allowed me to conduct workshops with schoolchildren, both on-site and over the long term. Students from vocational high schools or vocational training certificates, whom we prioritize, came to see the immersive experience, and we then worked on it. Before coming from Cannes, I finished a workshop with three vocational high school classes. We reenacted Claudette's trial with a lawyer.

Immersive is multifaceted. What would you define it? "Immersive" is a word that confuses people because they wonder what it refers to. Especially since a book can be immersive. This word also reflects the difficulty of summarizing a concept that can be declined infinitely. From Dust [winner of the Best Immersive Work award at the 2025 edition] is the film of an opera composer who created a work around this universe. When I discovered this world of immersive, I told myself that the beginnings of cinema must have been like that. There is a comparable energy. Making immersive is expensive, like film stock in its early days, and therefore it forces you to make choices. Moreover, it is both very technological but at the same time, it is pure craftsmanship because no one really knows what they are doing.