VR: Shelter

For the second year in a row, De Cinema presents a selection of VR films: experiences that blur the boundaries between the visible and the invisible, inviting you to look, feel, and experience in a different way.

SHELTER is a virtual reality documentary by filmmaker, historian, and curator Sjors Swierstra (HET VOORVAL– ARMANDO EN DE MYTHE), co-directed with Ukrainian producer Ivanna Khitsinska (FORTRESS MARIUPOL. SIMON, QUEENS OF JOY). Khitsinska previously made a compelling documentary series about the soldiers of the besieged Azov Regiment in Mariupol. The film was shot on location in Ukraine, including Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, Khmelnytskyy, and near the frontline, and also uses archival footage.

The filmmakers take you to the places where Ukrainians seek shelter from drones and missiles almost daily: metro stations, basements, and improvised shelters. Underground, life continues—fragile, everyday, and profoundly human. You witness quiet conversations between pregnant women in an underground maternity ward, a heart-wrenching soldier’s funeral, the tense routine in a frontline barracks, and a symphony orchestra that continues to play in a basement.

Swierstra started from a familiar kind of media fatigue: the relentless stream of images can have a numbing effect. With this immersive experience, he wants you to feel again what war means when danger is quite literally hanging over your head. Khitsinska hopes the work sustains an emotional engagement: not only with the tragedy, but also with the strength of a population that endures.

SHELTER is explicitly not about destruction, the makers emphasize, but about how people cope with war—how they keep going, caring, waiting, singing, and falling silent. Khitsinska: “I hope this VR experience can keep people’s attention on what is happening in Ukraine. That they remain emotionally involved, that they see not only the tragedy but also our strength. Because the shelters do not tell a story of fear, but of a people who refuse to be broken.”

Additionally we are also showing the VR THE GREAT ESCAPE, spoken in Dutch or English.