Draw Me Close

Launching April 21 at Tribeca Film Festival’s Storyscapes, Draw Me Close blurs the worlds of live performance, virtual reality, and animation to create a vivid memoir about the relationship between a mother and her son in the wake of her terminal-cancer diagnosis. Weaving theatrical storytelling with cutting-edge technology, the project takes a deceptively simple and humanistic approach to the immersive medium: it allows the audience member to experience life as five-year-old Jordan, inside a live, animated world. Created by award-winning playwright and filmmaker Jordan Tannahill, described as “the future of Canadian theatre,” Draw Me Close is the first major co-production between the National Film Board of Canada and the UK’s National Theatre’s Immersive Storytelling Studio, in collaboration with multidisciplinary creative studio All Seeing Eye, led by its founder, Ollie Lindsey, with illustrations by Teva Harrison and Olie Kay. The experience is unlike anything the form has seen before, integrating live performance and VR into one seamless narrative, with the audience member as performer—an actor in the immersive world. This unique collaboration between the NT and the NFB began as a Research and Development Lab, spearheaded by the NT’s Toby Coffey, Head of Digital Development, and the NFB’s David Oppenheim, Producer, to advance the language of creative non-fiction VR. Pushing the boundaries of what is possible with dramatic storytelling, the experiential project, produced by Coffey and Oppenheim and co-produced by Johanna Nicholls of the National Theatre and the NFB’s Justine Pimlott, has emerged from the NFB/NT Lab as a groundbreaking exploration of the theatrical potential of VR and beyond. For rising international talent Tannahill, the Studio project commission marks his VR debut and first collaboration with the NT and the NFB. The world premiere of Draw Me Close at Tribeca Storyscapes is the first chapter of what is to be a feature-length immersive experience about Jordan’s relationship with his mother, to be developed in 2018.