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Lucy Liu and Eloise Singer are preparing to take “The Pirate Queen: No Safe Waters,” their immersive experience about Chinese pirate leader Cheng Shih, on an international tour next year, Singer tells Variety. The pair
have also co-written a graphic novel and are developing a new game.
The news comes as Singer, the project’s writer and director,joins the 2026 BAFTA Breakthrough U.K. cohort
.The franchise is built around a retelling of the stories about real life character Cheng Shih, who was a powerful female pirate in the South China Sea at the beginning of the 18th century.
“No Safe Waters” played in the Cannes Film Festival’s Immersive Competition this year, with Liu narrating and producing alongside Singer. It follows the original 2024 VR version of “The Pirate Queen,” which earned an Emmy nomination.
Liu says Cheng Shih was intelligent and strategically brilliant, and won respect through negotiation and leadership “in a world designed to exclude women entirely.” In Liu’s view, the pirate leader defies nearly every stereotype historically placed on Asian women in storytelling. “She was politically astute, ruthless when necessary, deeply strategic, and completely self-determined. Stories like hers remind us that history has always contained powerful, complex women – they were never centered in mainstream narratives,” Liu tells Variety. “That’s beginning to change, and I think audiences are hungry for stories that feel more expansive.”
Where the first outing was built for a headset, the new piece fills a shared room with projection, sound and movement. Audiences stand among storms and fleets as dragons move beneath their feet.
Liu does not appear on screen. She says voice carries a different kind of responsibility in immersive work, guiding atmosphere and movement at the same time. “In film, the camera captures a glance or physical gesture to communicate subtext, but here the voice can help create emotional architecture,” she says.
Singer has spent a decade on “The Pirate Queen,” the last three years of it with Liu, and says the pair have co-written a graphic novel, are preparing the international tour and are developing a new game. “I feel really lucky to be making it with Lucy. She’s thrown her heart and soul into this alongside me, and getting to build this world together has been one of the most special parts of the journey,” she says. “I love seeing how one story can take on a whole new life across different formats, each offering audiences a completely different way to experience it.”
Liu says the project’s ambition, and the importance of telling Cheng Shih’s story with nuance and scale, is something she and Singer both care about deeply. “We’re building ‘The Pirate Queen’ as a larger storyworld together, so it was never just about lending my voice to one experience,” she says. “As a producer, I wanted to help support the integrity of the story and the larger creative vision. I’m always drawn to work that challenges convention and creates space for voices and histories that haven’t been fully explored, and Cheng Shih’s story deserves that kind of scale.”
BAFTA named Singer to this year’s Breakthrough program, its Netflix-supported initiative for emerging screen talent, on Nov. 4. She was selected in the games category for “No Safe Waters.”
“It’s still a bit of a pinch-me moment. It’s something I’ve aspired to for such a long time, so to be selected is a little surreal, and to have BAFTA and Netflix recognize what we’ve created with ‘The Pirate Queen’ is incredibly special,” Singer tells Variety. “I’m especially proud that it’s for an immersive project. We started with a story we really believed in and wanted to bring it to life in a completely different way, something audiences could truly step inside and experience.”
A friend who went through the program before her told her to make the most of every opportunity. “So that’s what I intend to do! I’m really looking forward to meeting other filmmakers and finding ways to take over the world together,” she says.
Singer says this year is the first time she has really felt a scalable and sustainable future for immersive storytelling. “I’ve been genuinely encouraged by the level of distribution interest around ‘The Pirate Queen.’ It feels like there is a real appetite for immersive work now,” she says.
Liu sees the form as both an extension of filmmaking and something new. “It grows from cinematic language but it also asks the audience to participate differently. That changes the relationship between story and viewer,” she says. “We’re still discovering the language of immersive storytelling which is what makes this moment so exciting creatively.”
Singer’s background is in film and TV, and alongside new immersive work she is developing scripted projects. “I’ve always been drawn to stories about people who challenge expectations, whether they’ve been overlooked by history, underestimated by others, or simply refused to play by the rules,” she says. “Ultimately, I want to keep telling stories I really believe in and finding the most exciting ways to bring them to life.”
