THE Belfast Film Festival has lift-off and the Belfast Festival's three and a half week run comes to an end.

On Sunday in an XR event, a Black Box audience was treated to 75 minutes of virtual reality with individual headsets, earphones and hand controllers. Jacques Cousteau's grandson Philippe has made a ten-minute piece called Drop in the Ocean, which starts at the bottom of the ocean with all its glorious plankton and creatures, swimming past turtles, then ending up in a floating morass of plastic dumped in the ocean and polluting its creatures.

In Goliath: Playing with Reality, the award-winning piece narrated  by Tilda Swinton, you get to consider what it feels like to have schizophrenia  and you share the journey towards getting the right drug to treat it. In the 15-minute piece Missing 10 hours, the visitor witnesses what happens to a young woman gradually losing control after having her drink spiked.

Since the film festival started to have a section working with virtual media in this way the evolution of its content has been as myriad as humanity itself, yet the isolated, technology-dominated experience did not compare with the soul, energy and vibrational change in the audience's demeanour as Ellipses An Anthem to End Wars by Maria McManus and Keith Acheson was performed at the Duncairn Art Centre to close the Belfast Festival. The piece started as a poetry text inspired by the Armagh Observatory. It was commissioned by the Ulster Architectural Society and designed and coordinated by singer-songwriter Brigid O'Neill. In 2021 composer Keith Acheson set it to music, supported by an ACNI individual artist's resilience award.

The result was to celebrate twenty-five years of the Good Friday Agreement, performed by soprano, wind and the Arco String Quartet. Maria first read the poem, then the singing by Sheelagh Greer followed by the composer's arrangement. The eleven people on the stage delighted the packed house, with many people experiencing  the arts venue for the first time. The demeanour of the audience as the standing ovation erupted was one of a changed people, charmed by the togetherness and artistry of eleven highly skilled artists performing to such a high level on a cold, dark winter night, contemplating  peace while elsewhere war is raging, knowing that peaceful solutions are possible no matter how impossible they might seem at different times. Bravo.

The Belfast Film Festival continues until November 11.

Lovers of Kneecap might not know there is a work in process and a sneak preview event is on Saturday at 11pm in the Black Box with filmmakers present.

The Outburst Queer Arts Festival starts Thursday, November 9. Locally, Grindr Saghdar Agus Cher  is performed on November 13 and 14 at the Cultúrlann, where three LGBTQ+ characters meet on a fateful night in a queer bar..