USC Shoah Foundation and Leading Holocaust Museums to Premiere and Exhibit Award-Winning Virtual Reality Film ‘The Last Goodbye’

Wed, 09/05/2018 - 12:19pm
A pioneering moment for Holocaust education, the world’s first virtual reality film to take audiences through a concentration camp, launches as immersive experience at four museums in New York, California, Illinois and Florida for limited-engagement exhibit.
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A Final Farewell

For Pinchas Gutter, visiting his homeland is a haunting reminder of the family he lost and the life he might have lived. He returns one last time to say goodbye and capture his personal saga in virtual reality for future generations.

'The Last Goodbye' Wins Two Webby Awards

Tue, 04/24/2018 - 11:10am
The virtual reality film about Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter won for best branded 360 video and took home a People's Voice award for best narrative experience in the online film and video category.
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“The Last Goodbye” VR Film to Compete at Venice Film Festival

Wed, 08/16/2017 - 5:00pm
The film will be exhibited as part of the festival’s first-ever competition for films made in virtual reality.
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Vox Media’s Code Conference to Feature New Dimensions in Testimony and “The Last Goodbye”

Fri, 05/12/2017 - 5:00pm
USC Shoah Foundation will present its interactive media projects to some of the brightest minds in technology at the prestigious Code Conference, hosted by Vox Media, in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., May 30-June 1.
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Virtual Reality Dominates at 2017 Tribeca Film Festival

Where “Blackout” thrives in the present, “The Last Goodbye” takes a look into the past. A co-production between Gabo Arora and Ari Palitz of Here Be Dragons, the USC Shoah Foundation, MPC VR and OTOY, the experience follows Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter as he toured the Majdanek Concentration Camp in July 2016 to cope with the loss of his family. The documentary-style piece entails the viewer visiting the camp with Gutter and exploring it in ways never seen before, all while listening to his heart-wrenching story of perseverance and loss.

Tribeca 2017: Five Questions with The Last Goodbye Director Ari Palitz

Perhaps the most powerful piece at this year’s Storyscapes, the Tribeca Film Festival’s annual survey of the biggest and best in new virtual reality work, was The Last Goodbye. The pieces’s concept is both simple and ambitious: to have a Holocaust survivor guide the viewer in a tour of the concentration camp where he was interned over seven decades ago.

Tribeca Film Festival: Five new VR projects you need to know

One of the great questions — in life, not just in VR — is how we’ll memorialize victims of mass tragedy. Technology offers myriad tools, but how to use them so that they’re effective and not exploitative? Specifically, this has been a question involving the Shoah — how will the murder of 6 million people be marked when the day comes that anyone old enough to have lived through it will have died? As the youngest survivors approach 80, it’s more than a hypothetical.

Audiences Captivated by USC Shoah Foundation Virtual Reality Projects

Wed, 04/26/2017 - 5:00pm
Over the past few years, USC Shoah Foundation has embarked upon two interactive media projects which have already emerged as groundbreaking endeavors in the field – the “New Dimensions in Testimony” project, and this year’s The Last Goodbye immersive virtual reality experience that has made waves at the Tribeca Film Festival’s Virtual Arcade.
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A Devastating Holocaust Documentary Proves VR Filmmaking Isn't Just a Gimmick

It’s really easy to mess up a film project about the Holocaust. The wrong tone, the wrong direction, and it can all go horribly awry. Add cutting-edge technology operated by unskilled hands to a topic as devastating as survivor testimony, and you could have a disaster. Fortunately, the VR film The Last Goodbye, which debuted at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, gets it right.

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