As a journalist, I knew immediately that this was a space where important stories could be told. As a documentary filmmaker, I had often faced the challenge of having to build a visual recreation of an event from the past. And so I began to experiment: Could I use virtual reality to offer a better understanding of how events transpired, and to make people connect to stories they might otherwise ignore? Could I reach younger audiences who are accustomed to digital worlds and gaming platforms, and help them become informed global citizens? To me, these are the ultimate goals of journalism.

I dedicated the next seven years of my life to finding out, using sound as a foundation for storytelling. With my film “Hunger in Los Angeles,” the first V.R. documentary shown at the Sundance Film Festival, in 2012, I used real audio from a food bank where a man waiting in the long line collapsed into a diabetic coma before he received food. At the premiere, I watched with amazement as my audience tried to walk around the “seizure victim” on the ground, while many emerged from the goggles crying.

I pushed further with “Use of Force,” using cellphone video to recreate a scene in which United States Border Patrol officers beat and Tasered a migrant to death. I brought a witness to a lab, where I motion-captured her bodily and facial movements while she recalled her memories of the night. Rather than watching a video of her telling you what happened, you hear and see her own re-creation through her body as much as her words. The story is visceral.

I kept experimenting with what this remarkable medium can do, concentrating on the kind of socially consequential topics that are sometimes difficult to keep an audience focused on with traditional journalism techniques. With “Project Syria,” you stand inside a thoroughly researched re-creation of a street in Aleppo as a bomb goes off. The segment is based on video and audio captured before and after the real event, photographs of the location and Google Earth maps. In “One Dark Night,” about the shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, you see only the events that were documented by 911 calls, within a simulation based on architectural plans of the condominium complex and Mr. Zimmerman’s videotaped police testimony.

We were able to push even further with “Kiya,” a tragic story of a domestic violence homicide that you see here. In this film, two sisters try to save a third sister from being shot by her former boyfriend. It uses Freedom of Information Act material gathered after the homicide; interviews with the sisters and the police; and most important, recordings of two 911 calls that captured the entire sequence of events to re-enact a tragedy and bring new attention to the issue of domestic violence.

I have now seen tens of thousands of people respond to these pieces, and I know that they work. They tell important stories in an entirely new way, and they use the immersive power of virtual reality — its ability to generate intense empathy on the part of the viewer — to wring from the audience the intense emotional connection that these stories deserve. Kiya’s story still haunts me, and I hope that you are moved by it, too.

Nonny de la Peña is an immersive journalist in Los Angeles and the chief executive of Emblematic, a company that makes virtual reality content. “Kiya” is her fourth work at the Sundance Film Festival.