Tribeca Film Festival Adds Multimedia Nuclear Weapon Experience ‘the bomb’

Michael Douglas, Eric Schlosser and rock band The Acid will participate in world premiere of immersive 360-degree installation and performance

Tribeca Film Festival poster

The world premiere of “the bomb,” a multimedia experience that explores the nuclear threat by combining a 360-degree film screen, a panel discussion featuring Michael Douglas and a live performance by the band The Acid, will highlight the interactive and experiential program at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival, TFF organizers announced on Wednesday.

The installation and performance will take place at Gotham Hall on the final weekend of the festival, April 23 and 24. A look at the culture of nuclear weapons and the difficulty of controlling them, “the bomb” will place the audience in an enclosed oval space surrounded by 30-foot screens, which will show a film created by “Fast Food Nation” author Eric Schlosser and filmmaker and artist Smriti Keshari, with input from filmmaker Kevin Ford.

The Acid wrote a score for the film, and will perform it in the center of the space, which was created with the help of art and design firm United Visual Artists and graphic designer Stanley Donwood.

The performance will be preceded by a panel discussion featuring Schlosser, Keshari, the MacArthur Foundation’s Emma Belcher, Ploughshares Fund’s Joe Cirincione, director Robert Kenner (who’s at Tribeca with his film about a nuclear accident, “Command and Control”) and actor and nuclear non-proliferation activist Michael Douglas.

“The experience is simultaneously an archival story, musical performance, and haunting visual and auditory simulation that blends artistry with political and social issues,” said TFF Festival Director Genna Terranova in the press release announcing the program.

After its Tribeca Film Festival world premiere, “the bomb” will travel to Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Paris and Berlin, among other cities.

Tribeca also announced five virtual-reality projects that will join its Virtual Arcade at the Tribeca Festival Hub: “Grateful Dead: Truckin’,” a VR look inside the band’s final tour; “Seeking Pluto’s Frigid Heart,” a stereoscopic journey to the distant planet; “The Click Effect,” an “immersive journalism experiment” partially funded by Annapurna Pictures that lets viewers experience the communication of dolphins and sperm wales; “Collisions,” Lynette Wallworth’s exploration of the indigenous Martu tribe in the Australian desert; and “PERSPECTIVE 2: THE MISDEMEANOR,” a 360-degree live-action drama about young men stopped by a police officer in Brooklyn.

In addition, the festival added speakers to the Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Imagination Day, an April 19 summit about futuristic technology and creativity.

Speakers will include uBeam inventor Meredith Perry, OS Fund founder Bryan Johnson, author and futurist James Canton, Ph.D., IBM Senior VP John Iwata, and VR directors Felix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphael, who will give their talk entirely in VR.

The new speakers who will join a previously announced slate that includes Richard Branson and Google’s Regina Dugan.

The 2016 Tribeca Film Festival will begin on April 13 and run through April 24 in lower Manhattan.

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