Dissemination

CIAC researchers explore new ways of telling stories through immersive and interactive cinema

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The Walking on Ice project, developed at CIAC – Research Centre for Arts and Communication, has been approved by the Office for Cultural Strategy, Planning and Evaluation under the investment scheme for cultural activities, receiving funding of around €300,000. With research and development led by Bruno Mendes da Silva and António Costa Valente, the initiative will create an immersive and interactive film inspired by a real episode in the life of German filmmaker Werner Herzog.

The project explores new ways of telling and experiencing stories through cinema, allowing users to interact with different elements of the film’s narrative world. By bringing together filmmaking, immersive technologies and interaction, Walking on Ice seeks to investigate new relationships between narrative, space and audiences.

The narrative premise dates back to November 1974, when Werner Herzog learned that his close friend, film critic and writer Lotte Eisner, was seriously ill in Paris. Faced with the possibility of her death, the filmmaker decided to walk from Munich to the French capital during the winter. He took a compass, a travel bag and a pair of new boots, driven by the conviction that Eisner would remain alive if he managed to complete the journey.

This journey, marked by distance, cold, determination and the bond between two people, provides the starting point for Walking on Ice. Beyond adapting a biographical episode into an audiovisual format, the project aims to explore how a story can be experienced immersively, giving audiences the opportunity to discover and interact with the elements that make up its fictional world.

Interactivity is a central dimension of the proposal. Users will be able to explore the narrative environment and engage with the elements within it, experiencing other ways of becoming involved in the story. This approach makes it possible to question the conventional boundaries of cinematic language and develop narrative models in which audience participation forms part of the construction of the experience itself.

The development of Walking on Ice will therefore contribute to research into the expressive possibilities of immersive and interactive cinema, as well as to reflection on emerging forms of cinematic creation and experience.

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