Ferenj. A Graphic Memoir in VR was an official selection of 2020 South by Southwest Festival and 2020 Tribeca Film Festival. It has since been touring festivals internationally, including Worlding Worlds at Mu Gallery in Eindhoven, the Netherlands and Cleveland Film Festival. Ferenj is a VR film in which guests are invited to inhabit a point cloud dreamscape. Here, home is a postspatial experience that is extended within the nonspaces of history, language, culture, music, and time. Ferenj is an immersive graphic memoir representing key moments from the director’s own "tezeta,” getting lost in liminality, learning how to make sense of her Ethiopian-American identity in the diaspora. This afrosurrealist VR film is an experimental form of emancipatory thought and resistance to othering, using photogrammetry to reclaim these spaces in the director’s own terms and redefine the boundaries between fragmented memories and the digital imaginary.

FERENJ. A GRAPHIC MEMOIR IN VR Trailer by Ainslee Alem Robson (Fiction and Entertainment '19)