Ancestors

Ancestors @ Tampere Art Museum 2025, photo by Jarkko Jortikka.

Original title: Ancestors
Title in Finnish: Kaltaiset
Genre: immersive experience
Duration: appr. 30’
Script: Hanna Haaslahti
Dramaturgist: Raimo Lång
Original concept:
Hanna Haaslahti & Steye Hallema
Director: Hanna Haaslahti
Mimics: Marc Gassot, Laura Rämä
Creative technologists:
Tyler Henry, Alap Parikh, Mike Robbins
Unity developer: Charu Tak
Digital wigs: Hamza Khaloui
Finance:
AVEK / Milla Moilanen
AVEK Mediarata
EU Creative Media
Film Tampere
Niilo Helander Foundation
YLE / Raimo Lång
Forums & Labs:
Sundance New Frontier Lab 2022
VRDays’ Immersive Tech Week Impulse 2022
IFFR Pro Immersive CineMart 2023
IDFA DocLab Forum 2023
Nordisk Panorama Immersive Media Day 2025
Project manager: Alap Parikh
Animation studio producer: Harmke Heezen
Co-development: Digital Culture Center MEET (Italy), Diversion (France)
Premiere: Tampere Art Museum
Sept 27, 2025 – Jan 11, 2026
Producers:
Raimo Lång / Yle Lab
Tuuli Penttinen-Lampisuo / Poike Productio
Executive producer: Fantomatico
Distributor: Diversion

Imagine meeting your avatar, who becomes an autonomous being, a character in a story. How would you perceive this unsupervised selfie, an actor who looks similar to you? A Subject? A mere Thing or an Object, perhaps even an uncanny Double?

As a character in the story, your avatar forms relationships with other personal avatars. How are you related to those social connections formed independently, without your involvement? To what extent are you responsible for the actions of your personal avatar?

Ancestors is an intimate and one-of-a-kind immersive room experience, where you become a progenitor of a virtually generated family. At the heart of the story are your descendants, “the children” connecting you and other audience members as the ancestors of an unique, one-time virtual lineage.

Ancestors is written and directed by Finnish media artist Hanna Haaslahti. Together with a collective of artists, creative technologists, producers from Yle and Poike Productio and a French distributor Diversion, she develops digital assets for personalized technology, to envision new narrative formats for immersive arts.