Clouds Over Sidra

Clouds Over Sidra is a 2015 360-degree virtual reality documentary about a 12-year-old Syrian girl living in the Za'atari refugee camp in Jordan. It was created by Gabo Arora, then a senior adviser at the United Nations, and the filmmaker Chris Milk, and was made by the UN Millennium Campaign, UNICEF Jordan, Samsung and Milk's studio VRSE, which later became Within. The film is presented as part of United Nations Virtual Reality (UNVR), a project implemented by the UN SDG Action Campaign, which describes it as "the first ever film shot in virtual reality for the UN".

The film premiered in January 2015 at a UN event during the World Economic Forum in Davos and was also shown that month at the Sundance Film Festival. In March 2015 it was shown at the TED conference in Vancouver and at a high-level donor meeting before the Third International Humanitarian Pledging Conference for Syria in Kuwait. Milk featured it prominently in his March 2015 TED talk "How virtual reality can create the ultimate empathy machine", which Kent Bye of the Voices of VR podcast later credited with popularizing the idea that VR can cultivate empathy. It won the Interactive Award at Sheffield Doc/Fest in June 2015.

Reviewed 15 October 2026. Every claim checked against its cited source (UN, OCHA, archived UNVR and Within pages, TED transcript, press, interview and three studies). About review dates.

Synopsis

The film follows Sidra, who narrates her own day in the camp. In the TED presentation of the film she introduces herself as a 12-year-old fifth-grader from the Daraa Province of Syria. According to the UN campaign, she had lived in Za'atari since the summer of 2013, and the film follows her to school, to her family's makeshift home and to the football pitch. OCHA's announcement described viewers following her into her new home and her makeshift classroom and sharing a meal with her family.

In a scene-by-scene account published in 2022, the researcher Moe Suzuki described the film as opening with the viewer alone in the desert while the narrator recalls the family's journey from Syria to Jordan. It then moves through the camp: Sidra's siblings playing, children walking to school in a line, Sidra's all-girls class, a bakery making pita bread in a tandoor oven, an internet café where boys play computer games, a makeshift gym where boys wrestle and girls play football, and a family dinner. The last scene shows the size of the camp, and the narration ends with Sidra saying that "the clouds moving over us also came here from Syria" and that one day she and the clouds will go home. Suzuki gave the running time as 8 minutes 45 seconds; Within's listing gave 8 minutes 35 seconds.

Sources give different figures for the camp's population. UN material from 2015 put it at 84,000 Syrian refugees, the UN campaign's later page said "over 80,000", and Within's synopsis said 130,000.

Production

According to Kent Bye's summary of his interview with Arora for Voices of VR, Arora was introduced to Milk in 2014 and then gathered enough support to set up a virtual reality lab at the UN, starting with a piece about the Syrian refugee crisis. The film was shot over two days in December 2014 at Za'atari. Arora wanted to show a day in the life of a 12-year-old refugee and worked with UN contacts to find the protagonist. In the interview Arora said that the crew had a 48-hour filming permit in late December 2014, that they wanted the film ready for Sundance a month later, and that the version shown there was later remastered. Milk said in his TED talk that the team went to the camp in December, and that the film was made with VRSE and the United Nations.

The BBC reported that the film was shot with a 360-degree camera and the scenes were stitched together, and that the film was made in partnership with the UN and Samsung, which supplied the Samsung Gear VR headset. In the TED talk, Milk introduced the film by describing VRSE's camera system, which had 3D cameras and binaural microphones facing in every direction.

The UN campaign credits the film as a collaboration between the UN SDG Action Campaign, UNICEF Jordan and VRSE, co-created by Milk and Arora. OCHA's 2015 release named Arora as the film's director, producer and writer. The BFI's report of the Sheffield awards credited the film to Arora and Barry Pousman. MIT's Docubase lists Arora and Pousman as directors and names Barry Pousman, Christopher Fabien, Gabo Arora, Katherine Keating, Samantha Storr and Socrates Kakoulides as producers.

In the same interview, Arora said that the key to building empathy in VR was to focus on ordinary daily activities such as eating a meal or getting ready for school, and that simply showing suffering can have the opposite effect. He cited Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others as a guide. In OCHA's announcement he said: "I want to influence decision makers, first and foremost."

Release and screenings

The film premiered at the UN Secretary-General's MDG Advocacy Group event in Davos, which called for partnerships to build resilience in vulnerable communities. The UN campaign said that supporters at the premiere included UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg. Games for Change lists its release date as 22 January 2015. TechCrunch reported at launch that it was shot for the Gear VR and could also be watched on an Oculus Rift, through the VRSE channel on Samsung's Milk VR service, or in the VRSE app for iOS and Android with a simple viewer such as Google Cardboard. A later Within listing named Web, WebVR, PlayStation VR, Gear VR, Rift, Vive, Daydream, Android and iOS as supported platforms.

Date	Event	Notes
January 2015	World Economic Forum, Davos	Premiere at the MDG Advocacy Group event
January 2015	Sundance Film Festival	Shown by Milk during the festival
March 2015	TED conference, Vancouver	Featured in Milk's talk; delegates could watch it in headsets
March 2015	Third International Humanitarian Pledging Conference for Syria, Kuwait	Shown to decision-makers at a high-level donor meeting
June 2015	Sheffield Doc/Fest	Won the Interactive Award

The UN campaign also lists screenings at SXSW, the Tribeca Film Festival, the Museum of the Moving Image, the World Education Forum and UN forums. Its 2016 page told Gear VR owners to download the film from the Vrse.works app in the Oculus Home store.

Use in advocacy and fundraising

OCHA said the aim of the Kuwait screening was "to connect donors with Syrians affected by the war and inspire leaders to make bold commitments". Donors at the conference, chaired by Ban Ki-moon on 31 March 2015, pledged US$3.8 billion for the 2015 Syria Response Plan and the Regional Refugee and Resilience Plan. The UN campaign later wrote that the film was screened before the appeal, "which eventually raised 3.8 billion US dollars". The pledge total covers the whole conference.

According to the UN campaign, the film was translated into 15 languages, was being shown by UNICEF face-to-face fundraisers in 40 countries, and "preliminary evidence has shown that VR is twice as effective in raising funds". The campaign also said UNICEF's education team used it at education forums and that it had been used to discuss the refugee crisis in classrooms in countries including South Africa and Argentina. In his 2017 Voices of VR interview, Arora said the UN had slotted the film into the Secretary-General's schedule at pledging conferences for Syria and Ebola and had consistently raised more than projected, but that this was not rigorous because "you can't really prove that's the film"; Kent Bye's summary gives the projected goal for the Syria appeal as US$2.3 billion. Arora said he was more interested in results from UNICEF's face-to-face fundraisers, who were given a version he cut down to four minutes: according to Arora, about 1 in 12 people stopped on the street donated without VR and 1 in 6 with it, and the average donation rose by 10 percent. These figures come from the UN and UNICEF, and the cited sources do not include an independent evaluation of them.

Reception

At Sheffield Doc/Fest 2015 the film won the Interactive Award. Writing in Sight and Sound a year later, Marisol Grandon said the prize helped "propel the UN production onto the international film circuit and boost donations to UNICEF", and that a "year-long debate followed" about the medium's power to humanise its subjects. She added that for many Sheffield delegates the film had been their first narrative VR experience. The same article quoted panellist Clint Beharry: "Saying VR is an empathy machine is like saying a paintbrush is an art machine".

The BBC's Jane Wakefield watched the film in a headset at TED in Vancouver and wrote that it "brought home to me the reality of life for the millions of displaced Syrians". Milk said in the talk that showing the film at Davos had put "people whose decisions affect the lives of millions of people" inside a tent in a refugee camp.

Research

Several academic studies have used the film as an experimental stimulus or as a case study:

Study	Design	Reported finding
Øverland and Seeberg, Tidsskrift for Norsk psykologforening (2019)	100 Norwegian students in a 2 x 2 between-group design: Clouds Over Sidra or a neutral control film about cooking, each in VR or on a PC screen; participants then stated how much they wanted to donate	Participants who saw Clouds Over Sidra in VR wished to donate significantly more than the other three groups
Borah et al., New Media & Society (2024)	More than 200 college-aged participants in a 2019 pilot and a 2021 main study, watching the film in VR or on a computer screen	VR raised sympathy and empathy overall; conservatives reported much larger gains in sympathy and willingness to donate after the VR version, while liberals reported high sympathy in both formats
Suzuki, European Journal of Cultural Studies (2022)	Experiential and textual analysis of the film	Argues that the film's "humanising" approach, through idealised figures of the refugee, an overrepresentation of children and the viewer's disembodied position, depoliticises displacement

The Norwegian study measured stated willingness to give between 0 and 1,000 kroner a month rather than real donations, and its participants were all students at UiT. The authors noted that this may limit how far the results generalise, and that it is uncertain whether the stated amounts reflect what participants would actually give. The Washington State University team likewise noted that their study covered only one crisis and only college-aged participants.

Legacy

UNVR's later films included Waves of Grace, about an Ebola survivor in Liberia, and My Mother's Wing. Arora founded UNVR. VRSE was renamed Within; Suzuki noted that by November 2020 the link at the end of the film, to a page about how viewers could help, no longer worked because of the rename.

See also

• Within
• Cinematic VR
• 360 Video
• Empathy
• Project Syria