Kathryn Bigelow makes her VR debut

As a filmmaker drawn to the most visceral forms of cinema, it was probably inevitable that Kathryn Bigelow’s high-adrenaline curiosities would lead her to virtual reality.

The Oscar-winning director premiered her first VR experience, The Protectors: Walk in the Rangers’ Shoes, at the Tribeca Film Festival on Friday: an eight-minute, 360-degree plunge into the lives of the Garamba National Park rangers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Bigelow directed it with Imraan Ismail, a virtual-reality veteran, and the two used the nascent, immersive medium to give a full sense of the dangers the 200 ragtag rangers face daily in guarding the Delaware-sized park, including its hundreds of perishing elephants, from the constant plundering of poachers and gunmen.

National Geographic will release the film May 1on the VR app Within, and on YouTube and Facebook360 the following week.

Bigelow’s virtual reality debut left her excited for its journalistic potential to inform and foster empathy.

“I love it,” Bigelow said of the medium. “I think it’s all about content, though. It’s not tech first; it’s content first.

“It opens up corridors to awareness and information about social geopolitical issues that you would otherwise have very little access to,” she added. “That’s the beauty of journalism ... to bring you to environments, stories, profiles of people that you otherwise have little or no access to.”