The Toronto International Film Festival makes history this year with the launch of what is being touted as North America’s first interactive dramatic feature, Late Fragment, wherein the audience is an active participant in the film, shaping its narrative with a simple click.

‘This is really an exciting new way to think about filmmaking and storytelling,’ says producer and interactive architect Ana Serrano. ‘There’s a sense of responsibility audiences feel when they are the ones doing the sequencing of the film, and that responsibility is similar to that of storyteller.’

Seranno is also director of the Canadian Film Centre’s Media Lab, where the film was created under the Interactive Narrative Features program in partnership with the National Film Board.

Late Fragment follows the interlocking stories of three participants in a restorative justice program for perpetrators and victims of violent crime. The opening scene is the same for all viewers, but from that point on the narrative changes depending on how a viewer navigates through the story.

‘The intention is to create compelling experiences that radically insert audiences into the meaning-making process of storytelling in its purest form,’ says Serrano.

Late Fragment will be presented Sept. 10 and 12 at 7 p.m., 9 p.m. and 11 p.m. at The Camera Bar, a venue dedicated to the interactive film. Audiences will experience the film in three ways. First, a veejay will ‘perform’ the film live, sequencing it for the audience. Second is the collective viewing stage, in which audiences sequence the film for each other. And third, individuals will sequence the film on laptops at personal viewing stations, which anticipates the project’s release on DVD.

The viewer moves toward one of three possible endings by clicking at any time during a particular scene. The sequencing of the story is determined by the timing of this interaction. There are three hours of footage in total, but, according to Seranno, a typical trajectory through the film lasts between 30 and 90 minutes.

The film follows a three-act structure, with each act divided into three chapters, each of which offers numerous distinct possible trajectories through the narrative.

‘One of the successes of this interactive film is that despite the number of choices and seemingly different fragments that this is made up of, we paid very close attention to making sure that whatever trajectory you choose, there is a story arch,’ says Serrano.

In keeping with interactive film’s essential connection with a diversity of points of view, Late Fragment was a collaboration by three CFC writer/directors, Daryl Cloran, Anita Doron and Mathieu Guez, who created a screenplay that looks nothing like a typical script.

Each writer contributed a thread of the story in 45 pages. Then, as interactive architect, it was Serrano’s job to start piecing the stories together. The script was literally cut up into scenes and then pasted on a wall, where different scenes were threaded together to reveal the many relationships among the three stories.

The slate of digital media elements at TIFF 2007 has expanded considerably over last year. In other initiatives, two films created on mobile phones will screen in Short Cuts Canada.

I’ve Never Had Sex, directed by Robert Kennedy, is based on the game where participants agree or disagree with a sentence that begins, ‘I’ve never had sex…’ It was created as part of the NFB’s MobiDocs: Confessions in a Digital Age, a collection of shorts created for the mobile film market.

‘We thought this short film was a really interesting use of the cell phone, which is such a new medium. It’s interesting to see what artists and innovators are doing with it,’ says Short Cuts programmer Jay Dart.

Another mobile phone film set to screen in Short Cuts is Matthew Swanson’s Tic Tac Toe. The short was created for TIFF’s 2006 Talent Lab. This year’s Talent Lab participants will also use mobile phones to create short films.

Other ventures include more blogs. Last year, the festival made its first foray into blogging when documentary programmer Thom Powers started the Doc Blog, which went so well that the festival has added six new ones this year.

‘Over the last few years, [blogging] has become a huge part of the culture. It’s a way for people to communicate,’ says Powers. ‘It’s also a grassroots way for a wider number of films to gain attention.’

In addition, the festival has added new technology-themed sessions in the Telefilm Canada News & Views section. There will be a session on social networking and its impact on film, and a panel on new portals and web spaces for independent filmmakers to showcase their work.

‘The social networking movement is so huge – it’s about building awareness and word of mouth. It’s community building, and niche marketing,’ says industry initiatives director Kelley Alexander. ‘It’s amazing how this is being employed by the film community.’