Heartbeat
Johanna is married to Paul, her childhood sweetheart. She spent 10 years trying to get pregnant. Mostly unsuccessfully. She tried everything, including IVF. She spent every penny she could save on infertility treatment. It meant they delayed buying a house. On the few occasions Johanna did manage to get pregnant, she suffered a miscarriage. The first time it happened, she had absolutely no idea what to do. Heartbeat tells Johanna’s story using her words. It’s the inside story of a miscarriage from the perspective of the woman who went through it. Johanna breaks the taboo and rejects the conspiracy of silence.
Dee Harvey is a multi-award-winning director specialising in immersive media and virtual reality filmmaking. Her film Heartbeat, a verbatim VR documentary about miscarriage, won Best Narrative at Raindance Immersive and the Audience Award at Art*VR in Prague in 2024 and has competed at Kaohsiung Film Festival, Aesthetica Short Film Festival, Bogoshorts, New Images, and Pordenone Docs Fest. Her next project is Carbon Women, a VR branching narrative opera, which she pitched at the XR Market at New Images. In November 2024, she directed Medusa's Notebook, a dome projection experience exhibited as part of the Belfast International Arts Festival. In 2023, she directed Lost in the Luminous City, an augmented reality poetry reading by Moyra Donaldson. Projects in development are Loss, a verbatim feature documentary about stillbirth, and an Irish-language feature film. Dee is the Chief Strategy Officer at HoloEdge Digital, a startup focused on bringing best-in-class immersive audio and visual live broadcast and recorded experiences to opera houses and orchestras.
