The newly announced Expanded programme will include immersive art, extended reality and video games.
LFF Expanded, the BFI London Film Festival‘s showcase of Immersive Art, Extended Reality and Video Gaming works, returns for the 70th edition of the Festival (7–18 October 2026).
Inviting audiences to explore powerful new ways of telling stories on screen, this year’s LFF Expanded will include nine projects that span immersive art, virtual reality, AI and video gaming.
Leading the way from a major new venue for the Expanded strand, St Martin-in-the-Fields, is the Immersive Special Presentation, ‘Water Body’ created by Hackney-based studio Marshmallow Laser Feast. The work explores water as the connective tissue of life on our planet, tracing unseen connections between landscapes, ecosystems and ourselves, developed in collaboration with critically acclaimed author Robert Macfarlane.
Meanwhile, marking its installation premiere in the BFI IMAX is ‘Red the Ocean Around U’, a dreamlike AI led installation from studio CROSSLUCID and writer Orion Facey. Evolving through the presence and decisions of every visitor who moves through it, the work prompts viewers to ask what happens when AI starts asking the questions.
At the VR lounge at the BFI Southbank Atrium will be two works reckoning with rising waters: ‘Solwata’ is an urgent mixed-reality documentary narrated by Mark Ruffalo that immerses audiences in the saltwater communities of the Solomon Islands, exposing a vanishing way of life that these communities did nothing to imperil. Meanwhile, ‘The World Came Flooding in’ is an XR journey created with flood-affected communities in Australia that uses memory and sounds to recreate homes lost to flooding through memory and sound.
Completing the Expanded line-up will be the return of the Games Lounge to the BFI IMAX. This will include …And Roger y TearyHand Studio, an interactive visual novel exploring memory, perception and the experience of dementia; The Day I Became a Bird by Passion Pictures and Hyper Luminal Games, a handcrafted adventure following Frank on his fledgling journey towards self-expression, LOFSÖNG by Unrelated Studio, a dazzling puzzle adventure that invites players to uncover a hidden language; Love Eternal by brlka, a beautiful, unsettling precision platformer where gravity shifts and memories become obstacles; and Mixtape by Beethoven and Dinosaur, which follows three friends on one last adventure together, set to the soundtrack of a generation.