Films impose limitations on their characters, often reducing them to overly simplistic figures. In response, Michael Keerdo-Dawson created an interactive film that reveals new dimensions of its characters on screen.
As a filmmaker, Michael Keerdo-Dawson found himself facing a fundamental dilemma: how can cinema portray a person in all their complexity?
He was dissatisfied with the idea of compressing a character into a conventional 90- or 120-minute film. Doing so inevitably requires highlighting certain aspects of a person while omitting others, giving the screenwriter or director the power to shape a character according to the needs of the story—or their own political or ethical intentions.
Keerdo-Dawson believes that every story has an agenda. Films have the power to steer audiences towards particular ideas.
For him, one possible solution lies in interactivity.
He created an interactive film with nine different endings, allowing viewers to decide how the story unfolds. In this way, the film becomes the audience's own. Some endings overlap, while others directly contradict one another, revealing different perspectives on the characters and their actions.
When the film is screened in a cinema, the audience votes by raising their hands to determine what happens next. The option receiving the most votes becomes the next scene.
The film formed part of Keerdo-Dawson's doctoral research, I Am the Paths Untaken: The Pluralised Protagonist and Her Implications in an Interactive Film, The Limits of Consent. His project followed an artistic research methodology, with the research question emerging gradually through the creative process itself rather than being fully defined at the outset.
He analysed his material using autoethnography, arguing that every investigation inevitably begins with the researcher's own perspective. The film is partly inspired by his own experiences. It follows a woman who helps socially awkward men seduce lonely women. The protagonist is an expert in the art of picking people up - until one of her intended targets unexpectedly unsettles her. At its core, the film explores questions of control, before inviting viewers to take control of the protagonist themselves.
"I transform my own experiences into a new fictional work and then analyse that process," Keerdo-Dawson explains. "Objectivity simply isn't invited to this party."
He concludes that he has created what he calls a pluralised protagonist—a character who paradoxically becomes increasingly complex and increasingly difficult to understand. The more viewers learn about her, the less certain they become, because she simultaneously exists in multiple, contradictory realities. This multiplicity makes it possible for the film to sustain conflicting ethical positions at the same time.
"The film can simultaneously present multiple perspectives without privileging any one of them, because the protagonist exists in each of those positions across parallel counterfactual realities. No ending is superior to another," Keerdo-Dawson concludes.
%20Movie%20poster_Michael.jpg)
