The fourth wall is an imaginative construct which separates a stage from its spectators, and actors from their audience. The fourth wall is not ‘real’, yet whatever side of it we are on, we accept it as such, we don’t cross this (b)order. In doing so, we respect the difference between this side of the wall and that, and give value to the imaginative construct that is the wall itself. We can do this so often, that we forget that there is any other way of engaging with this wall: this imagined border has become real.

And so it is with films and television – just mere stories. But when they are shot in locations that are real, that we know, that we live in – the fourth wall is shot or sliced through. The imagined leaks into the real, and the real seeps back into the imagined. As this occurs, we are jolted into recollection that, of course!, stories are not abstracted from our geographies, from our real lives; they are part and parcel of them. It is only the fourth wall, and our complicity in dismissing stories as mere entertainment, that has distanced us from them. With these stories, in this place, we can meet new characters, walk into pasts, travel into different dimensions just by paying attention. Shooting through the fourth wall these stories transport our places – and give us new eyes through which to see the worlds in which we live.