Bristol-based creative digital company Anagram has landed a major prize at New York’s prestigious Tribeca Film Festival for a ground-breaking ‘immersive’ documentary. 
Door Into The Dark, made by Amy Rose and May Abdalla at Anagram, which is based in Watershed’s Pervasive Media Studio, combines technology, storytelling and real, visceral experience.
It scooped the festival’s Bombay Sapphire Storyscapes Award – which has a $10,000 prize. Storyscapes is Tribeca’s showcase of immersive, interactive creations at the cutting edge of technology and storytelling, offering a chance to experience ground-breaking participatory work.
Door Into The Dark, presented in partnership with Watershed, has had its first showing in the US as one of five projects selected to take part in this year’s showcase.
Participants – who are blindfolded, shoeless, and alone – feel their way along a length of rope through a room, guided by a cast of voices.
The response to the documentary has been enormous with the entire run selling out and generating substantial word of mouth and press coverage, including the front page of the New York Times Arts Supplement. Indiewire proclaimed “this is how to do immersive storytelling” and The Verge said it was “like encountering a foreign country, using a language I’ve lived with for years but will never quite understand”.
One of the jurors said: “Ambitious, simple, and profound, Door Into The Dark marks a fresh and promising direction for the field of immersive theatre. It evoked a euphoria that stayed with us long after we left it.”
Over the past year Anagram has worked with the Young Vic Theatre, Sheffield DocFest, the Tower of London, Birmingham Cathedral, Greenpeace, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Stoke City Council to produce projects ranging from experiential documentary, through to public art, children’s toys and video games.
Door Into The Dark has come a long way since its early days. It was made in residence at the Pervasive Media Studio. Anagram teamed up with another resident, Tom Melamed from Calvium, to integrate iBeacons technology that would allow the story to unfold as the participant moves through the space in their own time.
It was first shown as a very early prototype back in 2013 at the i-Docs Symposium, led by UWE’s Digital Culture Research Centre, which is also based in the Studio.
From there, it has gone from strength to strength, being commissioned for Sheffield Doc/Fest, where it was discovered by Ingrid Copp, Tribeca’s curator of Storyscapes, who then invited the team to this year’s festival.
