Bozeman Magazine

This Thursday, January 26th, in conjunction with the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, we'll be hosting a special event at the Emerson featuring food and drink from the Emerson Grill, an award-winning virtual reality experience, and the Montana premiere of the critically acclaimed new documentary, Notes on Blindness.

Doors open at 6pm, and beginning at 6:15pm, we'll be offering the opportunity to experience Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness, a brilliant virtual reality piece designed to accompany the film.

An immersive virtual reality (VR) project based on John Hull’s sensory and psychological experience of blindness, the interactive experience complements the story world of the feature documentary. Each scene addresses a memory, a moment and a specific location from John’s audio diary, using binaural audio and real time 3D animations to create a fully immersive experience in a ‘world beyond sight’. The project won the Storyscapes Award at Tribeca Film Festival and the Alternate Realities VR Award at Sheffield Doc/Fest.

See a preview of Into Darkness here.

It is a truly fascinating and unique piece, and will be the first virtual reality experience we've shared at the Doc Series. We'll have four VR headsets available and guides to walk you through the process. Opportunities will be available on a first-come first-served basis, so get there early!

The crew from the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival will also be on hand with information about the upcoming fest, and we'll be premiering the brand new trailer for this year's festival before the evening's feature presentation.

At 7pm, we'll present the Montana premiere of Notes on Blindness, a truly beautiful, unique and powerful documentary.

In 1983, after decades of steady deterioration, writer and academic John Hull became totally blind. To help him make sense of the upheaval in his life, he began keeping a diary on audiocassette. Notes on Blindness takes a creative approach to the documentary form. Actors lip-synch to the voices of the family, embedding John’s original audio recordings within vivid cinematography and textured sound design. The result is a poetic and intimate story of loss, rebirth and transformation, documenting John’s extraordinary journey into “a world beyond sight.”

Notes on Blindness world-premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, and has gone on to become one of the most critically acclaimed documentaries of the year.

Tickets are available at the door or before the event at Cactus Records and Movie Lovers, and online at www.bozemandocseries.org.

The series will continue every other Thursday through April.