Festival
Professionals
School Screenings
slider navigation
slider navigation
The Place Beyond
da / en
Tickets
When you have bought tickets, they will show up here
Date
Antal
Event
Venue
    * Tickets bought via EAN are not shown here.
    Passes
    When you have bought a pass, or is assigned one, it will show up here
    Active
    Type
    Name
      Festival
      Professionals
      School Screenings
      Tickets
      When you have bought tickets, they will show up here
      Date
      Antal
      Event
      Venue
        * Tickets bought via EAN are not shown here.
        Passes
        When you have bought a pass, or is assigned one, it will show up here
        Active
        Type
        Name
          da / en
          slider navigation
          slider navigation

          March 19 – 30, 2025

          slider navigation
          Tickets
          When you have bought tickets, they will show up here
          Date
          Antal
          Event
          Venue
            * Tickets bought via EAN are not shown here.
            Passes
            When you have bought a pass, or is assigned one, it will show up here
            Active
            Type
            Name
              The Place Beyond

              The Place Beyond

              Elena Lyubarskaya & David Steiner / France & Germany

              What does your soul really look like? The Place Beyond is a collective AI-Powered interactive experience for museums/VR. With friends or strangers, experience synthetic “death” with an AI guide, who “transforms” your soul into a visually stunning escape-room like Purgatory, where you solve riddles visualizing your deepest conflicts... with a twist!

              Do you think you know yourself?

              The Place Beyond is an AI-powered collective immersive experience for digital museums and XR devices, set in a fictional future where humanity overcame death and therefore needs a synthesized, artificial Afterlife. It invites participants to experience digital dying and Purgatory, in which they explore their “souls” – visual metaphorical representations of their inner selves and life stories, created by AI after interacting with them. Those “mindscapes” are riddles that express each participant’s deepest internal conflicts, and by solving them and transforming their personal spaces the participants get ready to “reincarnate” again, with a new life story. While all of this allows every individual audience member to be transported into the magical 3D-space “Inside their own head”, The Place Beyond has an important collective dimension. As our story progresses, the AI appears to have a glitch. It can no longer remember which space represents which participant. Now, as a participant, I have to guess which of the mindscapes in front of me is my “soul” and which ones are the “souls” of other people I share the experience with – friends, spouses, or simply strangers I encountered in the museum or theater. As I am trying to identify my “soul” among others, I can’t help asking myself – do I know myself well enough? Could a synthetic, AI-powered machine figure me out? Who is better at “reading” people – AI, or humans? And if a meaningful story emerges from all of this, who is creating it – me, or the AI? Available both as a VR experience and an interactive museum/theater piece with digital screens that represent the 3D mindspaces, the Place Beyond pushes the boundaries of storytelling and entertainment by opening a new, AI-powered dimension of art – the one that expresses the inner life not of some fictional character or an author, but the one of the recipients themselves, and encourages them to interact with the spaces beyond each other’s foreheads. Executed in cooperation with AES+F (https://aesf.art/) – an contemporary art collective famous for their conceptual approach to art as an expression of collective subconscious, the project implies the AI’s “creative process” is based on strict guidelines created by human artists, turning AI into a tool in their hands.

              The Place Beyond

              Elena Lyubarskaya

              Creator, Producer

              Biography

              Elena Lyubarskaya is a writer, creative producer, and script consultant based in Berlin. With 15 years of experience working in television, Elena believes in vision-centered storytelling. She is a creator and writer of "Pauline" (Disney Plus, 2024), "The City of Blood" (post-production, Disney Plus, 2025) and a Grimme-Preis. nominee. Alongside her own writing, Elena works as a script and story consultant and has completed a Script Consulting Training in the framework of the Midpoint Institute Feature Launch programme. In 2023, she founded "The Dream Room" - a production and IP development company in Berlin.

              The Place Beyond

              David Steiner

              Producer, Creator

              Biography

              David Steiner co-founded Parallell Cinéma in 2009 and has been its CEO since then. The company was founded with a double focus. A focus on wide-audience, universal stories, deep, entertaining, punch-in-the-gut themes — David has managed award-winning feature-length films selected in major international festivals. And also a focus on technology — thanks to a theoretical physics university degree and lifelong programming for both work and play, David has lifted Parallell Cinéma to one of the top leading Stereoscopic 3D production companies in Europe.