Kate Voet

An immersive lion on fading memory

On the island of Lazzaretto Vecchio, during the 82nd Venice Film Festival, A Long Goodbye was not watched in a theater: it was inhabited with a virtual reality headset. Kate Voet, a Belgian filmmaker and screenwriter based in Brussels, co-signed this 35-minute interactive experience with Victor Maes, which places the viewer in the body of Ida, a 72-year-old pianist living with dementia. The Venice Immersive jury awarded it the Achievement Prize, a lion that recognized a form of storytelling halfway between cinema, gaming, and moving painting.

From Merksplas to The New School

She grew up in Merksplas, in northern Flanders, and at eighteen she moved to Amsterdam to study English philology and, later, theater. An exchange program took her to New York, to The New School, where she shot her first pieces and understood that photography, writing, and the performing arts could converge into a single craft. Back in Belgium, she studied directing at LUCA School of Arts (Sint-Lucas) while working in communications and sales. She left the office to dedicate herself to cinema.

Short films dealing with the loneliness of the mind

Les Homards Immortels (2017), with Jill Verhaeghe and Jan Bijvoet, follows two lovers who reunite and do not remember the same past in the same way: a non-linear story about the loneliness of the mind and unreliable memory. The Tears of Things (2021) extended that intimate and sensory atmosphere. Both short films toured international festivals. At the Torino Film Lab, the Venice Gap-Financing Market, and the IDFA Doclab Forum, she refined a cinema of atmosphere, closer to an audiovisual poem than a thesis drama.

Watercolor, cassette tapes, and Joep Beving

A Long Goodbye, a Belgian, Luxembourgish, and Dutch co-production by Cassette for Timescapes, Tarantula, and Valk Productions, took over five years. Ida's apartment is drawn in watercolor; the objects and recordings of her husband, Daniel, reconstruct a shared life. The music is by Joep Beving. After Venice, the work traveled to Film Fest Gent, Thessaloniki—where it won the Golden Alexander—, IDFA, FIPADOC, Clermont-Ferrand (Best XR Film), SXSW (Agog Immersive Impact Award, 2026), and Annecy (Cristal for Best Immersive Work). In 2026, Voet moved to the other side of the table as a juror for Venice Immersive.

Two feature films on the horizon

Today she is developing two fiction feature films and continues to present A Long Goodbye at festivals, care centers, and immersive media gatherings. She is represented by Henneman Agency, with Pim van Breemen as talent manager. Her place in the contemporary scene is that of an author who uses the body, sound, and technology to make us feel what cannot be explained: oblivion, care, and the long goodbye.