Cinemacity is a collaborative project by Caspar Stracke and Gabriela Monroy, created during an EMARE Residency at the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT) in Liverpool, UK. Cinemacity is a participatory film project about (and placed into the) cinema. The point of departure for Cinemacity was created by participants from the city of Liverpool, who submitted short stories based on serendipitous and ìcinematicî personal experiences. These were then transformed into an essay film, featuring re-enactments, as well as segments consisting of visual metaphors responding to the submitted text pieces. The participants were invited to act, appear in or be recorded reading their own story, becoming in this way collaborators in the production process as well. All segments were shot in Liverpool -when indicated- at the specific locations where the original stories happened. During its screening, the project will offer a second layer of participation posing a question to the viewer: What if the film you are watching right now allows your instant participation? The second part of Cinemacity's narrative will be created live and driven by a participating audience directly in the cinema space.

Cinemacity is a collaborative project by Caspar Stracke and Gabriela Monroy, and takes place at Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT) in Liverpool, UK. Caspar and Gabriela are two artist/filmmakers from Germany and Mexico living between New York and Helsinki. Their work covers a whole range of disciplines ó experimental film, documentary film, video installation, and live video performance. As curators, they have been the directors of an annual festival/exhibition of international contemporary moving image art in New York- video_dumbo -since 2005. This year they also have been selected as the programmers of the renowned Robert Flaherty Documentary Film Seminar in NY. Their work is concerned with architecture, urbanism and the social aspects of cinema, explored through both curation and filmmaking; all of which are fully contained within their project for the EMARE residency at FACT, Cinemacity. This collaborative, interactive film seeks to open out the audience experience of cinema-going and grant the viewer control and immersion not only in the cinema space, but also during the filmmaking process itself. The story of Cinemacity is created by participants from the city of Liverpool, who submit short stories based on personal experiences which felt so unreal that they ìcould have been in a movieî. These cinematic vingnettes will then be transformed into a collage film, allowing the storytellers to be as involved in the action as they wish to be, and screened in an interactive, real-time cinematic experiment. This project focuses on what it is to tell a story, and also what it is to told one. Identity, memory and experience all push together to generate a crowd-sourced dynamic view of the city, of the people who inhabit it, and of the ways in which everyday life interacts with the cinematic.