When the Biopic Becomes a Room

At the Venice Film Festival this week, a new David Bowie documentary is playing without behaving very much like a documentary.

Bowie: Unseen | Unheard runs for 25 minutes, but there is no single screen to watch and no conventional sequence of talking heads explaining the life. The installation spreads across eight screens and 84 hidden speakers, combining Bowie’s music, commentary from his former official photographer Denis O’Regan and more than 800 photographs, rare, familiar and previously unseen, from roughly two decades of the singer’s career.12

The audience is not simply shown the archive. The production is designed to place people inside its atmosphere: the seconds before Bowie walks onstage, the scale of an arena, the compressed intimacy of backstage life. It is biography converted into space.

That makes Bowie an unusually useful case study for a larger change already underway.

The life story escapes the rectangle

For most of film history, the basic contract of the biographical documentary has been stable. A creator’s life is assembled into a sequence: archival footage, photographs, interviews, narration, music, perhaps a few carefully selected objects. The audience receives a point of view from a fixed seat but extended reality changes the grammar before it changes the facts.

Venice Immersive, the XR section of the Venice International Film Festival, marks its 10th anniversary in 2026 with 68 projects from 26 countries. Its program includes virtual reality, mixed reality, immersive films, installations and virtual worlds.3 Bowie’s project sits in the same competition as experiences about firefighters, climate change, wolves, forgotten artists and the birth of stars.

That context matters. XR is no longer being treated only as a technology demonstration attached to a film festival. Venice now presents it as a storytelling category with its own competition, distribution ambitions and increasingly mature forms.

The conventional biopic asks what information should be included. The immersive biopic adds another question: where should the audience stand while receiving it?

Bowie gets more than one afterlife

Bowie’s current posthumous presence makes the shift especially visible because his archive is being interpreted through several different physical and technological forms at once.

Earlier this year, David Bowie: You’re Not Alone opened at Lightroom in London. The 360-degree production draws from thousands of hours of material in the David Bowie Archive and uses Bowie’s own archival voice rather than a new narrator. Performance footage surrounds visitors while a spatial audio system reworks the songs for the venue. The show is arranged in thematic rather than strictly chronological chapters, moving through ideas such as theatricality, spirituality, songwriting and reinvention.4

The production has since been extended in London through January 2027 and will also run at Aviva Studios in Manchester in December and January.5

Across town, the David Bowie Centre at the V&A East Storehouse offers almost the opposite proposition. It is a permanent home for an archive of more than 90,000 items, including costumes, instruments, handwritten material, photographs and unrealized projects. Visitors can see curated displays, but the museum also allows people to request individual objects for study.6

One legacy is therefore being presented in three ways at nearly the same moment: the archive as research material, the archive as a 360-degree public experience, and the archive as an XR documentary environment.

None cancels the others. Together they suggest that “the Bowie story” is no longer expected to fit inside one authoritative film.

From biography to inhabitation

The same experimentation is happening beyond celebrity musicians.

Finding Frida, also in competition at Venice Immersive, concerns Frida Hansen, the Norwegian textile artist whose international reputation faded over time. The 41-minute VR documentary begins with a miniature Art Nouveau villa that expands around the viewer. Archival photographs, woven works and period material become portals inside an environment shared by Hansen and her great-great-granddaughter. The creators describe the production as combining photorealistic 3D scans, dreamlike projections, animated artwork and voices drawn from interviews and historical sources.7

Another Venice competition project, Outrenoir, turns to French painter Pierre Soulages, with Isabelle Huppert listed among its principal performers.3

These are not simply galleries with projections added to the walls. Their creators are using the tools of documentary, primary material, historical testimony, chronology, context, while making space itself part of the argument.

A conventional film about a painter can show the scale of a canvas. An immersive work can attempt to make scale physically legible. A film can explain how a room influenced an artist. XR can reconstruct the room and make the explanation happen inside it.

That is the promise: not more facts, necessarily, but a different relationship to them.

The archive becomes a stage

The transformation is even clearer in music, where audiences already understand biography through performance.

ABBA Voyage remains one of the clearest commercial proofs that a legacy experience can function as something other than retrospective film. The production uses digital versions of the four members, created with their participation through motion capture, performing with a live band in a purpose-built London arena. The official production is careful to say that the performers are digital avatars, not holograms.8

The important part is not the terminology, it is authorship.

ABBA helped create the versions of themselves that audiences now encounter. That does not eliminate every philosophical question about digital performance, but it gives the project a powerful form of consent: the artists participated in designing their own mediated afterlife.

For creators who are no longer alive, the equation changes. Estates, archives, photographers, producers and technology companies become interpreters. The more immersive the experience becomes, the more authority those interpreters acquire.

Editing a documentary always shapes a legacy. Reconstructing a room around an audience shapes it more aggressively because the interpretation can feel less like interpretation. It can feel like presence.

Immersion can also overpromise

The failure case is instructive.

Elvis Evolution opened in London in 2025 with heavy expectations that it would offer a technologically advanced encounter with Elvis Presley. The production combined archive material, actors, musicians and multimedia, but its reception was damaged by confusion and disappointment over what audiences believed had been promised. Critics and visitors repeatedly compared it unfavorably with ABBA Voyage.9

By August 2026, Ellipsis Entertainment Ltd., trading as Layered Reality, had entered creditors’ voluntary liquidation. Recent reporting tied the collapse in part to the costly Elvis production and its poor reception.10

The lesson is larger than one troubled show. “Immersive” is now powerful enough as a marketing word to create its own credibility problem.

Audiences do not necessarily need a synthetic performer or an expensive technical trick. Bowie: Unseen | Unheard is built largely from photographs, sound, music and testimony. What makes the form new is the spatial arrangement and the emotional logic of the material, not an attempt to persuade anyone that Bowie has literally returned.

That distinction may determine which legacy projects age well because there is a line between bringing an archive closer and pretending absence has been solved.

Who gets to finish the artist?

Every biography is selective. Every museum exhibit excludes more than it displays. Every documentary compresses years into minutes. Immersive media does not remove those problems, it makes them architectural.

Which version of an artist gets reconstructed? Who selects the voice that guides the room? When unfinished sketches become animated environments, where does preservation stop and completion begin? If artificial intelligence is eventually used to generate speech, movement or new performances, what counts as documentation and what becomes authorized fiction?

Those questions are especially sharp around artists such as Bowie, whose work was built on deliberate reinvention. A single definitive version would almost miss the point.

The strongest current projects seem to understand that. You’re Not Alone uses Bowie’s archived voice but organizes it thematically. Unseen | Unheard openly frames itself through O’Regan’s photographs and memories. The V&A keeps the underlying archive accessible enough for other scholars and creators to make different arguments later.

The technology surrounds the viewer, but the provenance remains visible and that may be the standard worth keeping.

The documentary is becoming a place

There will still be traditional documentaries. There should be. A carefully edited two-hour film remains one of the best machines ever invented for turning an enormous life into a coherent argument. But the cultural institutions surrounding artists are beginning to recognize that coherence is not the only useful way to experience a legacy.

Sometimes the better form is a room full of photographs and 84 speakers. Sometimes it is a digital concert built by the performers themselves. Sometimes it is a reconstructed garden belonging to a textile artist almost lost to history. Sometimes it is an archive where the visitor can ask to see one physical object and spend time with it.

The biopic used to bring a life to the audience. Extended reality is trying something more ambitious and more dangerous: bringing the audience into the life.

The difference sounds technical until the room closes around you.

Reporting & references

La Biennale di Venezia, “Bowie: Unseen | Unheard,” Venice Immersive 2026. SourceThe Guardian, “David Bowie enters a new dimension in ‘extended reality’ documentary,” Sept. 2, 2026. SourceLa Biennale di Venezia, Venice Immersive 2026 program and selection announcement. SourceDavid Bowie official site, “David Bowie: You’re Not Alone,” Feb. 10, 2026. SourceDavid Bowie official site, London extension and Manchester run announcement, June 17, 2026. SourceVictoria and Albert Museum, David Bowie Centre and archive information. SourceLa Biennale di Venezia, “Finding Frida,” Venice Immersive 2026. SourceABBA Voyage official site, production and digital-avatar overview. SourceThe Guardian, coverage of the troubled reception to Elvis Evolution, July 23, 2025.The Times, reporting on the financial collapse surrounding Elvis Evolution, Aug. 29, 2026.K2 Partners / London Gazette notice, Ellipsis Entertainment Ltd. creditors’ voluntary liquidation, Aug. 11, 2026.