Visitors create the story in the ‘library’ of ‘Miriam’s World’ at Theatre Passe Muraille

Filmmaker Naomi Jaye’s interactive video production “Miriam’s World” is transforming Theatre Passe Muraille into a public library unlike any branch you’ve ever browsed before, yet uncannily familiar in the experience.

It’s been more than a decade since Jaye first envisioned adapting Martha Baillie’s Giller Prize — longlisted novel “The Incident Report” into a film, but the book’s themes — illuminating the intersections between public and private spaces — still resonate today, perhaps even more urgently as socioeconomic disparities make libraries one of the last safe refuges for the city’s disenfranchised populations.

To call “The Incident Report” a novel is perhaps inaccurate, but there are no exact words to describe Baillie’s wonderfully disjointed story. (It’s no surprise to learn that the author worked at the Toronto Public Library for a couple of decades.)

Divided into 140 “reports” from a fictional Toronto branch near Allan Gardens, the story threads the personal life of 35-year-old librarian Miriam Gordon together with her daily encounters with people who violate library rules, which she documents in the “Manual of Conduct for Encounters with Difficult Patrons.” It’s a poetic mystery, infused with romance, humour and much empathy for those who make libraries their makeshift homes.

In 2009, Jaye was passing time while waiting for a friend at Book City on Danforth Avenue when she stumbled across Baillie’s novel, published by the now-defunct Pedlar Press (it’s still available through Coach House Books).

Jaye was immediately attracted to the cover image of an official report in manila because it reminded her of the photocopied art she was then producing. But after scanning the book’s first page, “it was love at first read.”

That instant connection had never happened before. Jaye had no experience optioning a book, but she immediately called Pedlar publisher Beth Follett determined to make this unusual story into a film.

Although Follett and Baillie were both on board with Jaye’s cinematic vision — the filmmaker and the author got along like “a house on fire” — bringing a feature film to screen is a long, complicated process without any guarantees. Meanwhile other projects came to the forefront.

In 2013, Jaye directed her debut feature, the Yiddish-language Second World War romance “The Pin,” which the New York Times described as a “tragic version of ‘The Blue Lagoon,’” adding: “It’s almost bewildering to think what this first-time feature director could build with a larger budget.”

As Jaye began exploring the possibilities of immersive video through her graduate work, she realized there was more than one way to tell complicated stories. While “Miriam’s World” is on at Theatre Passe Muraille, Jaye is finally in post-production on the feature “The Incident Report,” starring Britt Lower (“Severance”), Jean Yoon (“Kim’s Convenience”) and Sook-Yin Lee (“Shortbus”). Jaye wrote and directed, with Baillie and Charlie Kaufman (“I’m Thinking of Ending Things”) executive producing.

“Miriam’s World” is Jaye’s first foray into nonnarrative, multi-channel video installation, which she completed as her MFA thesis at York University. Last year, the first of three videos in her “MRI: From Behind the Plexi” series premiered at the Meridian Arts Centre, with a final one scheduled for next October’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

Inspired by her own experience, Jaye asked visitors to lie down on cots to view a woman inside a magnetic resonance imaging machine, choreographed onscreen as if in a dance, while other visitors watched from the sidelines.

Jaye is very interested in inviting viewers in, while upending expectations of what happens in spaces and how we are supposed to behave.

“When you watch a film, you sit in a theatre, the lights are turned off and you watch a screen in front of you. It starts and it ends, you leave and everyone is complicit,” said Jaye. “When I went into my thesis, the question I was trying to answer was, ‘Can I make a film that doesn’t rely on narrative to keep people in the room? How do I keep people engaged? Can I do it with world and with character, and with atmosphere and tone, but without a story?’”

At Theatre Passe Muraille, library desks and shelves are surrounded by eight video screens set up in a 360-degree configuration. Eight characters, including the titular Miriam, appear on the screens, going about their business.

“You can stand and look. But you can’t absorb all of it by just facing one way because there are people all around you,” said Jaye.

Inspired by the power of Janet Cardiff’s acclaimed 2001 sound sculpture “Forty Part Motet,” in which 40 speakers, each representing a voice in a choir, surround the listener, Jaye played with audio design to enhance her work’s sonic intensity.

Tickets are scheduled for one-hour intervals, during which time visitors can walk around or move through the space on wheeled chairs, peering inside folders and other written materials. Jaye has also hidden notes for the more curious to uncover.

“People really like trying to gather and make meaning out of what they are seeing because there is no plot,” she said. “There are people who really want to understand what the story is and there are people who just let it hit them. But it’s just this very visceral, strange fever dream with all these odd characters gathered in this library.”

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