In September 1997, the Venice International Film Festival's non-competitive Orizzonti section included an entry that does not appear in any official retrospective of the festival, is not mentioned in the major histories of interactive cinema, and for which the only available documentation consists of a three-paragraph notice in a now-defunct Italian film journal and a single page in the personal archive of a retired festival programmer who spoke to us on condition of anonymity.
The entry was submitted under the title "Dispersione" — Italian for dispersal or scattering. It was credited to a director identified in the festival materials only as V.M. It ran for four days. Fewer than two hundred people experienced it in full.
What We Know
According to the festival programmer's account, Dispersione was not a film in any conventional sense. It was structured across multiple locations in Venice: a vaporetto stop, a specific campo, a bookshop in Dorsoduro, and a residential building in Cannaregio whose owner had granted access for the duration of the festival. Participants received an initial document — the programmer described it as resembling a water-damaged letter — and were expected to navigate between locations over the four-day period, each visit revealing further elements of a story involving three characters whose connections became clear only through accumulation.
"It was the most alive I ever saw an audience," he told us, "because they weren't an audience. They didn't have a word for what they were."
What We Don't Know
We do not know what happened to V.M. after Venice. The initials do not correspond to any filmmaker with a documented career before or after 1997. We do not know whether Dispersione was shown elsewhere, whether it was documented, or whether any of its materials survive. We do not know who funded it or under what conditions it was produced.
One of the participants we located — a film critic who attended the 1997 festival — told us she had occasionally searched for information about the work over the years and found nothing. "I assumed I had misremembered what it was. It seemed too unusual to have left no trace."
We are continuing to investigate. If you have information about Dispersione or its creator, contact research@liminalarchive.org