2026 VENICE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL: VENICE IMMERSIVE ACHIEVEMENT PRIZE
There are moments in cinema when the screen stops being a window and becomes a portal.
“Empire at Sea“, Peter Flaherty’s twenty‑two‑minute SF solarpunk odyssey, doesn’t just invite you to watch—it drags you, salt‑sprayed and blinking, into its shimmering world of steel, algae, and ghosts of the mainland.
The film opens on the Aurora rig, a floating sanctuary built by climate scientists who once believed they could out‑think extinction.
Five years after the cataclysm that erased the continents, the ocean has become their entire map.
Then, one morning, Lani—Imani Jade’s luminous, haunted protagonist—spots a boat on the horizon.
It’s the first sign of life they’ve seen in half a decade, and with it comes the question that splits the soul of the film: do you welcome the unknown, or defend what fragile peace you’ve built?
Peter Flaherty’s direction is a fever dream of technology and emotion.
Volumetric actors hover like holograms around a table that doubles as a stage, their gestures refracted through Apple Vision Pro headsets.
Orlando Jones, Ayelet Zurer, Geoffrey Arend, and Beth Grant appear not as performers but as living data—faces sculpted from light, voices echoing across the digital surf.
The experience is communal, electric: ten viewers standing shoulder to shoulder, watching the future materialize before them.
The drama unfolds in waves—scientific precision colliding with raw human fear.
Sustainability becomes survival; inclusion turns into interrogation.
The Aurora crew debates whether compassion is still possible when the world itself has drowned. Flaherty orchestrates the tension like a symphony of conscience, each line of dialogue rippling through the holographic air.
Then comes the moment—the vote.
The characters rise, life‑size, around the table, their presence so tangible it feels like the ocean itself has climbed aboard. It’s breathtaking, terrifying, and utterly new.
You realize you’re not just witnessing a story; you’re inside the architecture of tomorrow’s storytelling.
“Empire at Sea” is more than a film—it’s a living experiment in empathy and immersion, a cinematic reef built from code and courage.
It earned the Venice Immersive Achievement Prize at the 2026 Venice International Film Festival, not for predicting the future, but for proving it’s already here.
The tide has turned. The dream is real. The future floats.
“Empire At Sea” is a SF solarpunk Augmented Reality drama about a group of pioneering climate scientists who move to a remote oil rig for theirsummer sabbatical to attempt to create a sustainable city at sea.
Halfway through the summer, the big one hits and wipes out the mainland.
Unable to make contact with anyone, they must fend for themselves.
We drop into the story five years later and meet Lani, our young female protagonist, on the morning she sees a boat on the horizon – the first boat or sign of civilization they have seen in five years.
The drama centers on whether our group should allow the strangers aboard or repel them by force.
This episodic, interactive drama speaks directly to the climate change generation with a thrilling father-daughter story that addresses themes of sustainability, inclusionary vs exclusionary principles, immigration, and multicultural communities.
It features a diverse and recognizable cast, including Orlando Jones (American Gods), Ayelet Zurer (Spielberg’s Munich), Geoffrey Arend (Goliath), and Beth Grant (No Country for Old Men).
Step into a world where storytelling, technology, and imagination collide. Empire at Sea is an extraordinary AR/VR experience – an interactive journey that places you inside a cinematic future.
Peter Flaherty is an american director and interactive artist whose work has shown in over a hundred international venues, including theaters, galleries, and museums.
He conceived and directed The Dial, an interactive narrative combining augmented reality & projection mapping, which premiered at Sundance in 2019.
He created and directed The Surrogate, a groundbreaking Virtual Reality narrative that melds 360 video with a computer-generated explorable environment, which was a SXSW Interactive Innovation Award Finalist in 2016.
He was Creative Director for Marvel Studios and Disney’s Eternals AR, a companion piece to Chloé Zhao’s feature film, which was released in November 2021.
He launched Empire at Sea, a Solarpunk AR drama about climate scientists who colonize an oil rig after an environmental catastrophe, which was commissioned by Lincoln Center, premiered in 2026.
He created three productions for the Metropolitan Opera in New York that are still in their active repertory: Lohengrin, and at the Met in 2023, an interactive version of The Flying Dutchman in 2020 featuring a live motion-captured virtual character, and a massive, 5-hour video projection for Parsifal in 2012.
On Broadway, he created the Video and Projection Design for Roundabout Theatre’s Sondheim on Sondheim, which was later adapted for HBO’s documentary film, Six by Sondheim.
His large-scale video installation, Pass Back a Revolver, premiered at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia.
He has designed video projections and interactive art for installations, performances, and concerts that have toured the world with The Builders Association, Complicite, Big Dance Theater, Basil Twist, and many others.
His video art has been shown at such venues as the MIT Media Lab and the home of Agnes Gund (President Emerita of MOMA). He has received grants from the Rockefeller MAP Fund, The New York State Council on the Arts, Doris Duke Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and agog, among others.
