Video still for My One Demand Seven people stride out across Toronto as part of an interactive film about unrequited love.

Film still by Blast Theory. Seven people stride out across Toronto as part of an interactive film about unrequited love.

Photo by Oscar TossoSeven people stride out across Toronto as part of an interactive film about unrequited love.

Photo by Oscar Tosso.Seven people stride out across Toronto as part of an interactive film about unrequited love.

Photo by Tanja Tiziana.Seven people stride out across Toronto as part of an interactive film about unrequited love.

Photo by Tanja TizianaSeven people stride out across Toronto as part of an interactive film about unrequited love.

Photo by Tanja Tiziana. A man smokes a cigarette at dusk

Seven people stride out across Toronto in an interactive film about unrequitedness.

To walk in a city is to be among strangers, freed from everyday expectations, liberated to luxuriate in your own thoughts. By the very act of moving you are thinking, you are shedding skins and finding more of yourself than you knew was previously there.

Over the course of a single sunset, as the shadows lengthen, My One Demand takes a slice through Toronto.

Starting with a baby in the arms of a woman walking out of Toronto General Hospital, we follow seven people – one at a time – as they move through the city as darkness falls. Each of the people we follow is older than the person before. Each person is very different from the next. As each person walks on, our narrator Maggie tells us about them and about herself, about the city here and those farthest away.

The seven walk across intersections and down sidewalks, finding unexpected short cuts and vantage points. They break into a deserted house. They wriggle through the hole in a fence to their camp on the wasteland. And when each of them meets the next person, we see their encounter unfold live. And slowly we learn that Maggie met each one at the Occupy protests in Toronto.

This single continuous shot was streamed live online and to the Toronto International Film Festival cinema in June 2015. Viewers interacted in real time on their mobile phones in the cinema or on their computers from anywhere.


My One Demand is part of Live Transmission, a collaboration project between The Patching Zone (NL), Blast Theory (UK), Translocal (FI) and Ontario College of Art and Design University (CA) with the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union.

The world premiere of My One Demand was presented in partnership with Luminato Festival.

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