Narrative Transportation as the Mechanism behind the Persuasive Power of Stories: From Parables to Audiovisual Media
Stories persuade audiences whose explicit beliefs diverge, and the question of why this happens motivates a long line of work on narrative transportation. This article asks how the transportation mechanism operates when a story withholds a verdict and leaves its central conflict open, and it does so through a structured content analysis of one director’s catalog of short films produced between 2018 and 2026. The corpus comprises more than 15 short films that have collectively won 31 awards and been selected for 84 official festivals across five continents. Each film was coded for narrative features such as open endings, character-first framing, inclusive casting, and formal constraint, and these features were cross-tabulated with the framing of the juries that conferred recognition. The analysis shows that films built around an unresolved question secured awards from juries with opposing vocabularies, including explicitly religious festivals and secular genre festivals. These results indicate that a reduction in overt persuasive intent is associated with broader cross-audience recognition, which supports the prediction that transportation suppresses counterarguing while sustaining emotional and imagistic engagement. The single-author design and the use of festival outcomes as an indirect index of transportation constrain the strength of the causal claim, and the discussion frames these limits as a guide for the direct audience studies that should follow. The findings have practical implications for independent filmmakers who want their work to cross audience boundaries at feature length.