For the past three months, Candice has been exploding every day, sometimes multiple times, with a record of seven. She’s now at 192 explosions.
Through a visceral VR spectacle, the award-winning cinematic duo Caroline Poggi & Jonathan Vinel portray her unstoppable anger as a haunting reflection of a world on edge.
For the past three months, Candice has been exploding every day, sometimes multiple times, with a record of seven. She’s now at 192 explosions.
Through a visceral VR spectacle, the award-winning cinematic duo Caroline Poggi & Jonathan Vinel portray her unstoppable anger as a haunting reflection of a world on edge.
We spent five years developing the story of The Exploding Girl VR, alongside other short and feature films. Over time, Candice aged. Her relationship to the world became sharper, more lucid, and also more brutal. In our previous works, violence was more abstract, often dismissed as mere teenage crisis. But Candice’s anger is the anger of an entire generation facing helplessness and collapse.
This same story, if filmed in live-action, would be unwatchable – too violent. Working in 3D allowed us to introduce distance and space for reflection. It gave Candice a voice.
We collaborated with Saradibiza and Lucien Krampf – who also contributed to the game world in our previous feature film Eat the Night – and sourced existing online 3D assets to reconstruct Candice as a hybrid avatar, like performing a form of digital reconstructive surgery.
Caroline Poggi studied at the University of Corsica and then graduated from the University Paris 8, while Jonathan Vinel specialized in editing at La Fémis. They initially directed solo projects before collaborating on As Long As Shotguns Remain, awarded by a Golden Bear for Best Short Film at the Berlinale. Their first feature Jessica Forever premiered at TIFF and later screened at the Berlinale. In 2024, their second feature Eat the Night was presented at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight.
Directed and written by
Caroline Poggi & Jonathan Vinel
Producer
Oriane Hurard, Arnaud Colinart, Pierre Zandrowicz, Antoine Cayrol, Mando Stathi, Myrto Stathi
Narrated by
Grace Seri
Lead 3D artists
Lucien Krampf, Saradibiza
Lead developer
Johan Vignon
Music
Malibu
Sound design
Olivier Voisin, Victor Praud, Nicolas Bredin
A production of
Atlas V, Byrd
With the support of
CNC, Procirep, Angoa