Invisible World (Web Site)

The year is 1994. The Cambodian civil war is still alive in the provinces. Phnom Penh is finally free of the Khmer Rouge, but is now a Wild West city with little infrastructure. Poverty, drugs and crime are rampant. Tourism is limited to adventurers and an unruly breed of Western expatriates who take advantage of this foreign country without connecting to its environment and the people who live in it.

Invisible World is a 22-minute interactive project that pushes the cinematic form on several levels, exploring the dissolving borders between East and West, past and present, life and death. Through the reimagined story of real events that occurred in Cambodia in the mid-1990s, it also blurs the line between documentary and fiction by drawing on the memories and perspectives of three characters whose fates suddenly intertwine during a shared traumatic event: the drowning and miraculous return of a young boy.

Breaking down the wall between filmmaker and audience, Invisible World hands most of the visual storytelling over to the user, who can choose from among several perspectives or versions of the story to watch. Using gripping visuals and a rich soundscape to examine how memory, perspective and experience alter our understanding of the past—and how our interactions change our experience of reality—it invites us to peel back the many layers of our own invisible worlds.