Solider Brother by Kaitlyn Jones

     The documentary that I chose to watch was Solider Brother, because my father was deployed to Afghanistan in 2006 and I remember what kind of struggles my family faced and I was interested to see what it was like for this girl and what she had to say about it. What I was expecting to watch was a documentary of a sister recounting memories that she had of her and her brother growing up, and essentially that is what the film was about. Before watching this film I had no idea what an "interactive film" meant and I guess I just expected it to be like a regular film with people and what not, but apparently "interactive" literally means interactive and you have to click on certain things to hear different portions of the video. Right off the bat this confused me because I had no clue as to which image I was supposed to click on first. Eventually I figured it all out but the film wasn't quite what I expected, as you click on one of several images a lady starts recounting certain memories she had with her brother that had some relevance to the picture of which you clicked on. As she is talking a dialog appears on the screen and you can see that it is messages between her and her brother after he gets deployed to Afghanistan. Their conversations that they had weren't there necessarily to show their topic of conversation, but more to show the struggle of actually being able to communicate with someone deployed over seas. Things like dealing with the time difference, not being able to ask certain questions that pertain to the work that he is doing, and not bringing up too many things about home to make sure that he doesn't start to feel homesick. The film really depicted all of the different struggles in kind of an abstract way. The entire duration of the film the narrator is strictly talking about her childhood with her brother, it is then up to the viewer to kind of put the pieces together. One thing that struck me as odd was that several times throughout the film there was a thing that would ask you to put in your number so that she (the narrator) could text/talk to you, which I'm not sure as to why but I found it pretty odd. Something that I did find helpful in this film was a little bio at the end of the author/narrator, this helped me understand the overall meaning of the video.
     I had read the chapter before watching the documentary, but because it was an interactive film it was harder to watch for some of the things mentioned in the chapter. I would assume that there was some strategy, or substantial reason, to Kaitlyn Jones choosing to have an interactive documentary versus a live one that could correspond to the different kinds of manipulation explained in the chapter. Other than that I wasn't quite able to catch any other relations from the reading to this documentary.