A Grandmother's Death Becomes a VR Journey: Hsin Hsuan Yeh Brings 'The River Within You' to Venice
A Taiwanese director is turning personal grief into immersive art. Hsin Hsuan Yeh, the animation film-maker behind Sense of Nowhere, will present her new virtual-reality project The River Within You at the Venice Gap-Financing Market, which runs 4–6 September 2026 during the 83rd Venice International Film Festival (Variety).
The 30-minute VR experience puts a single audience member, seated and wearing a headset, in the perspective of a grandmother who has just died. A butterfly guides her soul toward a final resting place — an ocean of tears. The concept draws on a Taiwanese folk belief that tears shed by the living onto the deceased can trap the soul, preventing it from finding peace (Variety).
The story is intimate because the story is real. Yeh was inspired by her own grandmother, who had terminal cancer and had lost the ability to speak by the time Yeh returned to Taiwan to see her (Variety).
Inside the experience, audiences use hand tracking — the headset reads their hand movements without a controller — as both a narrative and emotional tool. They solve puzzles that help the grandmother's granddaughter work through her grief. The visuals blend photogrammetry-scanned clay models, a technique that turns real physical objects into 3D digital assets, with CGI animation (Variety).
Producing the project is Hsia Hsien Chao, marking her first foray into VR as a medium for exploring life, death and bereavement. The production comes from Joyful Beings Animation Studio, a Taipei-based company Yeh founded in January 2025 (Variety; La Biennale di Venezia).
The Venice Gap-Financing Market, run under the festival's Venice Production Bridge initiative, presents projects from around the world that are in the final stages of development and funding. This year's edition selected 66 projects (La Biennale di Venezia; Cineuropa). The market exists to connect film-makers with the financiers and distributors who can push a nearly finished project across the line — The River Within You is currently in pre-production.
What makes the project stand out is the way it folds a very specific cultural belief into an emerging technology. The folk idea that grief itself can weigh down a departing soul gives the VR interactivity a genuine thematic engine: the audience is not just watching a story about bereavement but physically participating in it, using their hands to help someone let go.
