The Experience

Frontera immerses you in the world of Maria, a single mother from Venezuela, who has decided to migrate in order to save her children from the crisis. In this experience you will become Maria and live her story. You will have the power of making important decisions that affect the course of her journey, ultimately placing you, quite literally, in the shoes of a migrant.

Frontera was conceptualized to transmit an intimate portrait of what is it like be a migrant, to those who are not directly affected by the Venezuelan crisis but who live in migrant-receiving countries.

The experience takes you through Maria’s past: political turmoil, food scarcity, lack of medicines, crime and violence, economic crisis; the reasons why more than 3 million Venezuelans have fled and found refuge in other countries - where food, medicine, education, stability and freedom can grant a better life, but where you sacrifice family, language and culture. It also takes you to Maria’s present: living inside a tent in a refugee camp. And ultimately, to Maria’s future: a crisis unfolds and you have to choose where to go next.

This experience positions the viewer inside the life of a single young mother who left her children in Venezuela and migrated to Boa Vista, Brazil, with the hopes of eventually gaining a stable income that allow her to bring medicines back to her diabetic daughter.

Frontera aims to bridge understanding into why migrants leave home, what pulls them into new frontiers and what kind of decisions they have to make to get there. This experience will change the way you see migrants, refugees and displaced peoples forever. By erasing the limits between a 2D screen and the user, and providing you with a space to interact with and the agency to make decisions on Maria’s behalf, we believe that a deeper sense of empathy can be gained. This empathy and understanding can be a strong catalyst for action.

We chose to build Frontera intertwining documentary and fiction. The story takes place in a Boa Vista refugee camp, in Brazil, and the roads surrounding it. Maria is a composite of several migrants and their stories and the result of journalistic research and interviews. Her journey - her motivations and movement through the physical space - is one that occurs daily between the Venezuelan and Brazilian borders. To end the experience, we chose build a space where you can interact with migrant testimonies from all over the world and listen to their accounts. We decided to blend these two modes of storytelling to deliver the most powerful experience.