What Goes Up/Must Come Down

Free! Virtual Reality & Video Installation. This event takes place on October 14 from 1-8pm at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center Amphitheater.

Each year as the celebration for the Lunar New Year winds down, tourists converge on a village just outside of Taipei to launch thousands of lanterns into the night sky. They represent the hopes of their owners, and as they soar into the darkness they make for one hell of an Instagram post. But what happens when dawn breaks, the tourists leave, and those thousands of wishes fall out of the sky? Ingeniously weaving virtual reality and conventional 2D filmmaking, Jongsma and O’Neill fuse two discrete documentaries about the Pingxi Sky Lantern Festival into a singular whole, and suggest that our dreams may have staggering, real-world consequences.

This program is supported as part of the Dutch Culture USA program by the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York. 

What Goes Up/Must Come Down was created during Kel O’Neill’s Eisenhower Fellowship, received production support from FUnique VR, and was edited on the HP Z workstation.