It seems like such an easy request: a simple silence. A stillness without the weight of work or love or death. A moment in between. But we have learned there is an almost impossible gap between this ambition and the reality of living, that our silence is never simple. In the flickering light, we hold our breaths, anticipating the storm. Something must be lost before it can be found.

A Simple Silence is the final chapter in Riverbed Theatre’s award-winning “Just For You” Trilogy that premiered in Venice in 2022 with All That Remains and continued in 2023 with Over the Rainbow. This new 360VR experience continues the series’ exploration of our connectedness to the world around us, imbuing the environment with an animistic quality while also blurring the boundary between seeing and being seen. The audience is not a witness to the experience; they are the experience. A Simple Silence confronts us with the uneasiness of our inevitable truths, that every beginning implies an ending, that we are shadows passing through the darkness.

We are comforted by facts, by the familiarity of things we know to be “true.” The sun rises in the east. There are twenty-four hours in a day. I exist. These truisms simplify our lives, enable us to get through the process of living. We are not afraid to leap into the air, because we know we will land on the ground. All That Remains explores the possibilities that exist beyond these everyday patterns, that blur the lines between truth and fiction.

"All That Remains" premiered at the 79th Venice Film Festival from August 31-September 11, 2022. It was also screened at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival (Greece), Filmmakers (Italy), and the Luxembourg Film Festival.

This project is sponsored by a grant from the Taiwan Creative Content Agency.

Scientists have upended our sense of the natural order, shifting terms like “de-extinction” and “resurrection biology” from the realm of Hollywood action films into the vernacular of everyday life. In 1996, scientists at the Roslin Institute in Scotland ignited a firestorm of controversy when they cloned a female Finn-Dorset sheep using adult somatic cells. Images of the sheep, Dolly, quickly spread around the world, stirring concerns about the seemingly inevitable shift to cloning humans. People were faced with the troubling question of reconsidering their foundational understanding of identity and selfhood. Blur is a poetic exploration of these increasingly liminal boundaries between the past and the future, the living and the dead.

Blur is co-directed by Craig Quintero and Phoebe Greenberg and is an international co-production with Riverbed Theatre, PHI Studio, and Onassis.