Poetics at Cannes: Joining the Immersive Market Curators Network

Next month, Poetics will be at the Festival de Cannes. Not in the audience, but at the table.

We’ve been selected to join the Curators Network at the Marché du Film’s Immersive Market, a three-day programme that brings together curators, distributors, and creators working in location-based immersive experiences. The programme runs May 12–20 at the Carlton Hotel, inside a brand-new 450 m² exhibition space built specifically for experiencing XR work in festival-grade conditions.

This is the second edition of the Immersive Market, and the third year Cannes runs a full Compétition Immersive alongside it. What started as an experiment in 2024 has become one of the most important meeting points for anyone serious about the future of immersive distribution.

Why this matters to us

We’ve spent the past year and a half building the operational side. 1,500+ screenings, pop-up cinemas across Greece, partnerships with international distributors. But distribution scales through relationships: with the creators making the work, the catalogues representing it, and the other curators and venues figuring out how to show it.

Cannes is where those relationships happen. The Curators Network is designed for exactly this. One-on-one meetings with catalogue holders, live demos of new work, and conversations about what location-based distribution actually looks like in practice.

What we’re bringing to the Croisette

We’re coming to Cannes with a clear agenda: expand our catalogue, build partnerships, and contribute to the conversation about how immersive work reaches audiences beyond the festival circuit.

That last part is personal. It’s the core of my PhD research, it’s the reason we started Poetics, and it’s the question the entire Immersive Market is built around. We want to help shape this global conversation.

See you on the Croisette.