The growing importance of cross media content was evident at the FORUM on Tuesday with the presentation of two projects with a strong multimedia component: Prison Valley and Farewell Comrades.
“Prison Valley is a sort of interactive road movie where the visitor can follow the journalist in a small city in Colorado where everybody is part of the prison system. This is an innovative, previously unseen way of doing web documentary – mixing a story and interaction tools”, said Joel Ronez, head of new media commissioning at Arte France.
The web-doc is the latest collaboration between Paris-based Alexandre Brachet’s internet company Upian.com and Arte France. Last year, the companies – together with Israeli and Palestinian producers – made the interactive Gaza-Sderot, capturing the lives of ordinary Palestinians in the Gaza strip and their counterparts in the Israeli border town of Sderot.
Their new project revolves around Fremont County in Colorado, the site of 14 prisons holding some 7,500 prisoners. The makers have shot a central, stand-alone narrative, but at certain points in the story the user will be offered access to different interactive zones. Visitors to the Prison Valley site will construct their own narrative. Reaction to the project was mixed. Most commissioning editors loved the interactivity of the site, but questioned whether the topic of the US prison system would prompt interest among European audiences. “Rather than going to the U.S., why didn’t you tackle the situation in the French banlieue for example”, said the BBC’s Nick Fraser.
The interactive project attached to Ukrainian director Sergey Bukovsky’s epic 6-part series Farewell Comrades, about the collapse of the Soviet Union, also prompted interest with one commissioning editor asking whether he could take the website, but not the series. Billed as a European Media Event, the website is due to go live in 2011. “I am really interested in the interactive site, which would be great for my audience – is there any way we can break this out,” said Knowledge Network’s Murray Battle.
Other projects drumming up interest at Tuesday’s session included Yoav Shamir’s latest documentary, 10%, following the psychology studies of Dr. Philip Zimbardo and Dr Rony Berger into what makes somebody heroic. “I think if anyone has the ability to examine this challenging question about human behaviour it is Yoav,” commented Arte’s Nathalie Verdier.
Melanie Goodfellow