Documentary where audience choices shape narrative or montage — branching structure, often digital. Blurs line between film and game mechanics.
The viewer is no longer sitting passively in the dark. They click, choose, decide – and the film branches. This is the core problem and at the same time the principle of interactive documentary: it breaks with the classic authority of the filmmaker and delegates parts of the narrative control to the audience. On set, you don't notice it at first – you shoot as usual. But in editing, it becomes complex: you don't have to tell one story, but prepare multiple paths that overlap, branch, and possibly merge again.
In practice, this usually works as follows: the viewer is presented with choices at decision points – which perspective do I follow, which information level interests me, which character should I get to know better. Each choice leads to different material, different interviews, different editing sequences. This is fundamentally different from classic editing, where you as the editor decide when which information appears. Here, the viewer determines the pace and the route through your material. This requires a different dramaturgy – not linear, but rhizomatic. Each branch must function independently and yet remain coherent to the whole.
The technical implementation varies: some productions use specialized platforms or apps, others work with HTML5 interfaces or real-time engine technologies. This is no longer classic film in the cinema – it is hybrid, between film, game, and archive. You need designers, programmers, not just editors. The documentary claim remains: real stories, real people, real research. But the mediation becomes interaction. Some call this participation, others see in it the death of the curated work. In reality, it is a middle ground – you create the material and the structure, but not the final experience. That is individual. This also makes such projects difficult to evaluate: two viewers experience completely different films, even though they have both consumed your material. This presents experimental documentarians with new possibilities, and funders with the problem of a lack of standardization.