When the Venice Film Festival announces its competition slate each year, the names that surface tend to follow a familiar geography — European auteurs, American studios, the occasional prestige production from East Asia. This year, something different happened. A 27-minute virtual reality film produced by A R Rahman, directed by Chennai-based filmmaker Anand Kishore, earned a place in the main competition at Venice Immersive 2026 — becoming the first Indian VR production ever to compete for the section’s top prize.
The film is called ‘Anokhya: The Origin’, and its premise is as ambitious as its milestone status. Set within a mythical world drawn from the vast well of Indian epic tradition, the story follows a courtesan’s spiritual and physical journey to find a sage in the Himalayas. It is the kind of narrative that Indian cinema has circled for decades — questions of devotion, identity, and transformation — but rendered here in a medium that makes the viewer not just a witness, but a presence inside that world.
More Than a Milestone
It would be easy to frame this story purely as a first — and firsts matter, especially in an industry where representation at prestigious international forums has historically been uneven. But reducing ‘Anokhya: The Origin’ to its milestone status risks underselling what it actually represents: a serious, sustained creative investment in immersive storytelling from one of the most recognized figures in global music and film.
Rahman is no newcomer to the XR space. He directed and produced ‘Le Musk’ in 2022, an immersive experience that signaled his intent to treat virtual reality as a legitimate artistic discipline rather than a promotional novelty. More recently, he launched the ARR Immersive app on Apple Vision Pro, positioning himself at the intersection of spatial computing and cultural content at precisely the moment the industry is searching for compelling use cases for the platform.
This is a creator building infrastructure, not just experimenting. And ‘Anokhya: The Origin’ looks like the next deliberate step in that architecture.
Why Venice Immersive Matters
Venice Immersive — formerly known as Venice VR Expanded — has become the most credible international stage for XR filmmaking. Unlike tech festivals where immersive content competes for attention alongside hardware launches, Venice treats the medium with the same critical seriousness it applies to traditional cinema. A competition slot there carries genuine cultural weight.
For Indian VR filmmaking, that weight is significant. The country has a vast creative industry, an enormous domestic audience with growing access to mobile-first immersive experiences, and a mythological and historical canon that is essentially tailor-made for world-building at scale. Yet Indian productions have remained largely absent from the upper tiers of global XR recognition — until now.
Director Anand Kishore and the Chennai Connection
Much of the conversation around ‘Anokhya: The Origin’ will naturally center on Rahman, whose global profile makes him the most visible figure attached to the project. But the creative direction comes from Anand Kishore, a Chennai-based filmmaker whose work on the project deserves its own recognition. Bringing a story rooted in Indian epic tradition to a global immersive format is a translation challenge as much as a technical one — it requires understanding both the emotional grammar of the source material and the spatial grammar of VR storytelling.
The fact that this vision emerged from Chennai, rather than from an established Western XR production hub, is itself a data point worth noting. It suggests the ecosystem for serious immersive filmmaking in India is developing from within, not simply being imported.
A Signal, Not a Summit
Venice 2026 is not the end of this story. If anything, it is the moment that makes future stories possible. Other Indian creators working in immersive formats now have a reference point — evidence that the work can compete at the highest level when the creative investment matches the ambition. For a medium still fighting for legitimacy in some quarters, that proof of concept carries real momentum.
A R Rahman has spent decades making music that crosses cultural borders without losing its roots. With ‘Anokhya: The Origin’, he appears to be applying the same philosophy to immersive cinema. The Himalayas make for a striking destination. The journey, it turns out, was always the point.
