Story

IMMERSIVE STORIES. OWNED AND TOURING

East City Films is an immersive studio based in London. We develop, produce, and tour location-based experiences and VR documentaries for museum, festival, and exhibition audiences in the UK and internationally.

Founded in 2006 by Ashley Cowan and Darren Emerson, the company began in television and branded content before moving into immersive media in 2014. Since then we’ve built a portfolio of award-winning work that has shown at Venice, Tribeca, SXSW, Sheffield Doc/Fest, and IDFA, and toured to major cultural venues and museums across the UK and the US.

Our projects include In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats, an internationally touring multi-sensory VR experience set in the 1989 acid house scene; Common Ground, an interactive VR documentary about social housing and displacement; Indefinite, a VR documentary on indefinite immigration detention in the UK; and Witness 360: 7/7, an immersive account of the London bombings through one survivor’s story. In 2023 we produced three VR experiences commissioned by the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, including Letters from Drancy, which premiered at the Venice Biennale.

We work with cultural institutions, museums, festivals, and commissioning bodies. Our production has been supported by the BFI and Arts Council England, and we have partnered with organisations including Comic Relief and the British Heart Foundation to use immersive technology for social impact.

East City Films is an IP-holding company. We own and control our catalogue of immersive works and are building a sustainable model for touring and licensing immersive content internationally.

What we do

We make immersive experiences that combine documentary storytelling with VR, AR, theatrical design, spatial audio, and live performance. Our work is designed for touring – built to travel across gallery, museum, festival, and exhibition contexts with consistent quality and operational reliability.

We handle development, production, and delivery in-house, from financing and rights management through to technical build and on-site installation. We work across the full lifecycle of a project – from concept through to international exploitation.

Get in touch

If you’re a venue, festival, museum, commissioner, or co-production partner interested in working with us, we’d like to hear from you.