^{Super Stream Me by Tim den Besten and Nicolaas Veul}

An immersive experience combining the sounds and smells surrounding US President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, in which the participant lies enclosed in a morgue drawer, might seem like an installation more suited to an avant-garde gallery than a documentary festival.

But Dutch Marcel van Brakel and Frederik Duerinck’s macabre Famous Deaths will be just one of the many experimental works on display at IDFA’s DocLab, based at De Brakke Grond Flemish Arts Centre in central Amsterdam during IDFA 2015. “It explores the sense of smell as a narrative device,” says DocLab founder and curator Caspar Sonnen, adding wryly. “It’s perhaps the most daunting project we have this year.”

Sonnen created DocLab in 2007 in response to the way in which the internet and the digital revolution were impacting upon documentary storytelling. Today, it is one of the most important digital storytelling showcases in the world alongside events like the New Frontier exhibition at the Sundance Film Festival and Tribeca Storyscapes. “The internet is amongst one of the impactful inventions of mankind. It’s impossible to think about the documentary art form and not include the digital revolution,” says Sonnen.

From the beginning, Sonnen was keen to keep the selection criteria open rather than tying the event to one particular form of digital storytelling. “We look at the treatment of factual reality in any digital medium other than linear film. That is a very open and complicated definition to work with and yet it gave us the creative freedom to work with the projects that we love,” he says.

For this reason, DocLab’s selection and focus is constantly evolving. If, three or four years ago, docs playing with the touch-based functionality of the iPad were all the rage, this year’s “big thing” is virtual reality, Sonnen stresses. “We already looked at VR last year but since then the scene has exploded. What’s interesting is that it’s a very distinct new medium, unlike a lot of interactive story-telling projects which are harder to pindown.”

Virtual reality works showing in the IDFA DocLab Competition for Digital Storytelling include Dutch Jan Rothuizen’s Drawing Room, British Aaron Bradbury’s LoVR and Gabo Arora’s Waves of Grace, about an Ebola survivor in Liberia who uses her immunity to care for orphaned children.

Sonnen is particularly proud of illustrator Rothuizen’s presence in the competition line-up. “Jan did the DocLab Academy two years ago and got inspired to actually go into interactive,” says Sonnen, referring to DocLab’s training event for Dutch and Flemish filmmakers, artists and media professionals taking place during IDFA. “He went on to make Refugee Republic, which we premiered last year and is now winning loads of awards all over the world, and is now back with a VR piece.”

Developed during the Room On the Roof artist residency in a small room above Amsterdam’s famous De Bijenkorf department store, the Drawing Room offers the viewer a 360º experience from the centre of Rothuizen’s detailed illustrations.

Other Dutch projects on display at DocLab this year include Eefje Blankevoort and Dana Lixenberg’s Imperial Courts, Bruno Felix and Koert van Mensvoort’s Bistro in Vitro, about a virtual restaurant, Bert Hana’s Rebuild Fukushima, which gets participants to construct paper replicas of buildings destroyed in the nuclear disaster, and Tim den Besten and Nicolaas Veul’s Super Stream Me, probing internet privacy and how our lives our captured on the web. These four projects are showing in DocLab’s Seamless Reality programme, that looks at the ever-blurring lines between digital and physical reality.