SXSW 2026 XR Experience: “Lacuna” and “Lesbian Simulator”

XR Experience Spotlight @ Fairmont

It’s impossible—unless that’s all one intends to do—to catch all the different XR (“extended reality,” the umbrella term for AR, VR, and MR) exhibits at a festival like SXSW, but during the press preview yesterday, I was able to sneak in a few hours to experience two of them. Those were Lacuna, from co-directors Maartje Wegdam and Nienke Huitenga Broeren, and Lesbian Simulator, from Iris van der Meule. Both projects come from Holland, so the language choices are Dutch and English, with French soon on the way.

In Lacuna, we spend 34 minutes inside the fractured memories of octogenarian Sonja, a woman of Dutch Jewish background who was sent as a young child to Suriname during World War II, along with her sister, to escape the Holocaust. Her interviews with Maartje Wegdam form the primary voiceover, mixed with evocative music and other sound design to take us in and out of simultaneously concrete and abstract flashbacks. The visuals are appropriately dreamlike and then suddenly hyperrealistic, depending on what Sonja remembers. The result is a moving journey through time that asks to consider, with heartfelt empathy, the horrors and beauty of being human.

Unlike Lacuna, which features no haptic controllers, Lesbian Simulator is much more of an interactive video game, though empathy is still a strong theme. During the approximately 40-minute runtime, we assume the identity of a lesbian avatar (choosing, to some degree, our character’s primary color and costume), guided through a vibrantly hued world by a “Lesbian Goddess (voiced with a twinkle in her eye by Dutch actress Hanna van Vliet). Via a great variety of activities—coming out as gay, flirting in a bar, going on a date, facing public opprobrium and threats, shooting gay love bombs at a crowd to turn people queer and happy—the player is meant to understand all the (unnecessary) pressures gays and lesbians face in the world just being themselves and to have a great time doing so. My favorite moment was when I opened one of the doors that led me to a situation where I was supposed to loudly announce “I am gay” to the person on the other side and see what happens, only to find an extraterrestrial aboutto invade Earth who really couldn’t be bothered with my sexuality.

Walking around the XR space, I saw an enormous quantity of other booths. I wish I had more time. But I am not unhappy to have spent what little time I had on Lacuna and Lesbian Simulator and encourage everyone to do the same.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Chris Reed is the editor of Film Festival Today. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.