Directed by Karim Ben Khelifa | Country of Origin: France | Runtime: 20:00 | VR/360 Film
It was while filming THE ENEMY in Congo, his previous VR project, that Karim Ben Khelifa came up with the idea for SEVEN GRAMS.
Karim Ben Khelifa has discovered, ten years into his career as a war correspondent and photojournalist, that there is an unspoken moral contract that is established between the subject and the journalist. Why else would people accept to be photographed during some of the most difficult times of their lives? Do the people portrayed believe that journalism can have an impact on the events they are experiencing? For the last 5 years he has been experimenting with new ways of practicing journalism, using emerging media such as VR, AR and 360° soundscapes in order to find new ways to engage audiences. With SEVEN GRAMS, he wishes to provoke real awareness of the misdeeds inherent in this mineral trade in the DRC.
SEVEN GRAMS aims to bring the DRC’s tragedy straight to the smartphone that its mineral resources helped make via a free AR app on both IOS and Android systems. Through AR sequences, and an animated film, SEVEN GRAMS offers an entirely new way for people to understand the human cost that went into producing their smartphones.
Director Biography: Karim Ben Khelifa
Karim Ben Khelifa has been an award-winning war correspondent and photojournalist since 1998. He has been on assignment for publications such as Le Monde, Stern, Vanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, in countries such as Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, South Soudan, Kashmir, Yemen, Iran, North Korea, Libya, Egypt.
He is the director of the multi-user installation in virtual and augmented reality, THE ENEMY, which premiered in Paris in 2017 and was since presented in Tel Aviv, at the MIT Museum in Boston, at the Centre Phi in Montreal, and the Geneva International Film Festival during the 2018 PeaceWeek conference.
As an award-winning project, THE ENEMY was selected as one of the 80 journalistic projects that have influenced journalism the most by Harvard University. The AR app of the project has been dowloaded in more than 107 countries.