Blood Relations

“What makes us who we are?” is the question that drives Blood Relations, an unconventional VR documentary about an adopted child and an ancestral mystery.

Using vintage objects, photographs and ephemera from her family archives, writer/director Analee Weinberger invites us into the journey she took as an adopted child investigating her roots, discovering startling plot twists along the way.

Blood Relations is an immersive quest through surreal landscapes, from a scrapyard in Vancouver to a street corner in the Orthodox Jewish community of Bnei Brak and back to a decaying barn on a farm in rural Manitoba. The sights, sounds and characters encountered in each place evoke potential life paths that were or might have been.

As users seek and interact with objects in the environments, fragments of story are revealed. The collage of facts, memories, imagination and conjecture leads to a surprising and thought-provoking conclusion, inviting us to reflect on and explore our own personal stories.

Blood Relations is part of the New Identities initiative, an Israel/Canada co-production partnership in digital creation. The aim of the initiative is to create interactive experiences that question the narratives that have been passed on to us and which have forged our identities, with a view to reshaping them to create new identity stories.