A strand of the Tribeca Film Festival looks at interactive storytelling, including a project bringing together an Israeli and a Palestinian.

“He’s been to many warzones around the world and got really interested in this idea of empathy and enemies, and how do you humanise your enemy.” Ingrid Kopp, Director of Interactive at the Tribeca Film Institute, is describing one of the projects in her Storyscapes strand.

The Enemy is an installation bringing together an Israeli and a Palestinian as two full-scale human figures. It was created by conflict photographer Karim Ben Khelifa. “I think he got really frustrated by the limits of the photo and the limits of the still image, in some ways, around exploring these ideas,” says Kopp. “So his solution was to use virtual reality as a way to get us to think differently about images and enemies.”

Other projects in Storyscapes include an audio documentary played through headphones to blindfolded listeners and a web series called Do Not Track that incorporates information about each viewer into its episodes. Tom Brook reports on new forms of storytelling emerging at the festival.