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This Tribeca Film Festival, the Films Watch Back

'The Enemy' uses virtual reality to convey the human side of war.
​Image: Karim Ben Khelifa

​As people milled around me, unseen, I had a virtual room to myself—until I turned and saw a Palestinian freedom fighter, camouflaged but for his bright red bandana and his brown eyes, watching me from behind his mask.

I was at the Tribeca Film Festival, making awkward early morning small talk with producers and techs, waiting for my turn to meet The Enemy. Although it is being shown in the heart of a film festival, The Enemy doesn't describe itself as a film; it's an "immersive experience," although what I strapped into is more accurately described as a prototype.

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When it was my turn, I put on a backpack and some headphones. The ​Oculus goggles I wore looked like a falconry hood, with antennae protruding up top for communication with the motion-sensing cameras that framed the large open space around me. My only instructions were to "first, move closer to that wall, with the text."

The prototype dropped me into what looked like a gallery space, with text briefly explaining the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine. The pictures on the far walls were of two people—Gilad Peled, from Israel, opposite of Abu Khaled, from Gaza. Khaled is wearing a mask. In a voiceover, Tunisian photojournalist ​Karim Ben Khelifa explained why.​

Khelifa is associated with MIT's ​Open Documentary Lab, and the creator of The Enemy. His photography has appeared in Time, Vanity Fair, Le Monde and other magazines and newspapers, and The Enemy began as a photography installation, too. But it was expanded after Khelifa explored the media lab of a then-small company called Oculus in 2013. Although the Oculus guys told him their prototype was expensive, Khelifa told me that at the time he was too poor to consider money at all, and just wanted to know what was possible.

"What if my guys could come off the wall as photographs?" he told me he asked them. "They could be in the room, they could breathe they could move. They could look at you. They could speak but also have body language; your body language says so much about you about who you are. Could that be a way?"​

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After hearing about Peled and Khaled, I heard a door open. And when I turned, I saw each man standing there, facing each other, and looking at me.

It was startling. Maybe I was just self-consciousness, knowing that beyond the goggles there were a bunch of people watching me. Or perhaps it was the knowledge that the holograms were of real people—or that they were rendered in three-dimensions and could look me in the eye. Whatever the case, one after the other, I listened to Khelifa ask each man who they thought their enemy was, and whether they had ever killed. Gilad's held his hands nervously in front of him. I glanced down at my own feet, and they weren't there.

Image: Karim Ben Khelifa

For American civilians, far from the front lines, wars are often characterized by their media—Vietnam, the "first television war;" the first Iraq War, viewed through the infrared lenses of CNN; the Syrian Civil War, streamed via the curated Youtube Videos of a man in Maryland who goes by "Brown Moses."

But perhaps Oculus could be the right medium for something more personal, for meeting and seeing combatants as something other than "combatants" and therefore, an enemy. Khelifa wants to cover more longstanding conflicts—in Congo, Afghanistan and elsewhere—to show how on each side the dreams and aspirations and humanity is more similar than it is different. The goal is to scale—more Oculus rooms, more conflicts, multiple users at once.

Walking out of The Enemy I passed​ the display for Do Not Track, another non-film at the film festival. A row of laptops was set up like an Apple store, which may not be futuristic, but it's banality completely appropriate to the subject matter—what we give away, unthinkingly in our everyday lives online.

In contrast, the medium and mission of The Enemy can seem terribly sad: to get two people to stand in a room together, and to get an American to listen, requires a virtual approximation of reality.

But then, what's more everyday than standing and talking? Khelifa's goal is to show that beyond the uniforms, beyond the maps, beyond the slogans repeated in front of television cameras, there are people, more alike than different. Far from looking larger than life, The Enemy brings wars from "sides" to a human scale. The novelty of VR is going to go away. The need to tell those stories doesn't seem to be doing the same.