Connecting to Rural America from All Over the World: Hollow: An Interactive Documentary

Guided Screening with Elaine McMillion, Documentary Filmmaker; and Jeff Soyk, Art Director for Design and User Experience

The term “documentary” was coined by John Grierson, father of the documentary film, as the “creative treatment of actuality.” Digital and social media open up enormous potential for completely new kinds of documentaries: films that constantly update themselves with breaking information, are shaped by users, engage communities through social media collaboration, and are made more persuasive through personalization.
Hollow: An Interactive Documentary an award-winning example of those emergent capabilities. This new media film project invites viewers into the story of McDowell County, West Virginia – and the story of small town America today: of rural communities facing changes beyond their control, of boom and bust economies, and challenges and triumphs of every size.

By design, this documentary is a participatory project that examines rural America through the eyes and ears of its subjects. Using interactive technology, it allows viewers to experience McDowell Country through guided access to 35 important stories from the project, combining video portraits, data visualizations, photography, community-generated content and grassroots mapping to bring the stories to life.

The project won a prestigious Peabody Award in 2013, and has been presented at the New York Film Festival, MIT’s Open Documentary Lab, Harvard’s Berkman Center, and the Museum of Moving Image, among others.