The noises of the city fall behind as I enter the half-empty cinema. Almost physically, I feel the color of the shadows, the serene realm of the lucid dream that is about to begin.
To the left and right, faint silhouettes look illuminated towards the big screen. I remember having thought about this phrase before, in this very place, and also about what you said: ‘No matter how vast the darkness may be, we must project our own light.’
These thoughts bring me to the doorstep of a sci-fi movie set about the outter space. I enter; we exchange a few conventional and cordial words, and I hand over this manifesto. If I am not mistaken, you, Kubrick, were not disdainful of letters, although a text like this might have horribly annoyed you. However, this time you read it and make some gesture of approval, perhaps because in it you recognize your own ideas, perhaps because the flawed statements bother you less than the healthy copies.
At this point, my fantasy dissolves, like fire into fire. The cinema surrounding me is on Sant Antoni Maria Claret Street, not in Entença, and you, Kubrick, died of a heart attack in ’99. My vanity and nostalgia have constructed this impossible scene. But tomorrow I, too, will have become mere words and memories and the chronology of our lives will be lost in a universe of symbols, and somehow it will be fair to say that I have handed you this manifesto and that you have approved it.

The manifesto:
- More than artists, we are craftsmen; more than influencers, we are laborers. We seek to elevate our craft to the highest level by chiseling an image, a sound, a word, for days, months, years. Like Flaubert, but in cinema, we seek the ‘just frame.’
- In our films, the story is paramount. We understand cinema more as literature and music than painting and/or sculpture.
- Every festival, every government grant, every agent from big production companies, every audience, the entire world is already overcrowded with films, intoxicated. There’s no room for anyone else. ‘Filmmakers’ are complete and the line to become one is too long and leaves no time to create real films.
- We don’t know what we’re talking about. We haven’t been to any film school. Money isn’t even enough to pay the rent.
- Making films is an obligation and there is no other; no employment, no pension, no certainty, no progress, no happiness, no future.

- We tell modest and meaningful stories without large budgets (i.e., without any budget).
- Contemporary cinema demands the collision of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, as both are collapsing.
- Each department must contribute to the production with its own technical equipment.
- The use of AI and any technological tool is allowed as long as it is understood that these technologies are made to stupefy minds and undermine skills.
- Self-exploitation in cinema (and any other type of art) is a new form of dignity hard to achieve otherwise. Alternatives to self-exploitation no longer exist.
- Each team member owns a percentage of the film.
- Nothingness, stupidity, and disguised poverty are excellent themes to treat in contemporary cinema.
- No one should expect any economic benefit from anything.
- Every film must respond to a vital need. All types of posturing are forbidden.
- Posturing is valid only for influencers.
- Actors must contribute at least with 80% of their character’s makeup and wardrobe. In this regard, they must work jointly with the screenwriter and director in the creation of their characters.
- We are anachronistic. We know the absurdity of writing a manifesto now.

- All genres are valid as long as they are subverted and treated with dignity and rigor.
- Cinema must be primarily art and not industry, even though that may now cause laughter.
- We tell avant-garde, circular, darkly humorous, disturbing, and tender stories, never self-indulgent or generic; stories that establish a small new ray of light to feel discomforts differently.
- Some important concepts that guide us are: hyperrealism, metamodernism, metafiction, postexistentialism, ordinary psychosis, J. Lacan, J. Balvin, reggaeton, K. Marx, and J. Bach’s music.
- The screenwriter must be an erudite of cinema and literature. He must be know deeply the works of Shakespeare, Cervantes, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Baudelaire, Steinberg, Beckett, J. Florez, J. Asunción Silva, Carver, Céline, Ecclesiastes, and Borges.
- The music composer must be a music genius.
- The director must be obsessed with cinema and have watched at least the top 250 films ranked on IMDb, as well as thoroughly know the works of Bresson, Tarr, Wong Kar-wai, Welles, Boon Joon-ho, Keaton, Fellini, Lynch, and Haneke.
- We must be excellent at optimizing time and resources. A maximum of two locations and three days for each shooting.

- A shot must never have more than five takes.
- We live modest lives; to survive we accept any other type of work and better if it is not related to cinema (the more proletarian the more valuable for the production).
- We make use of narrators off-screen and voices in post-production (See: A Man Escaped). Well-done direct sound is very expensive.
- We like contradictions and the use of literary figures; the oxymoron and the hypallages and the polysyndeton and the anacoluthons.
- We are committed to the subversion and mixing of genres.
- We are a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a cop…
- We firmly believe that the written or spoken word is still more valuable and powerful than Instagram filters, WhatsApp emojis, or TikTok effects.
- We will go viral.
- For shooting, we sign written collaboration contracts that have no legal effect.
- A movie should last only as long as necessary to be excellent. Boredom as an aesthetic effect is an aberration now, a cliché that only serves to mask the mediocrity of the new filmfluencers who saturate festivals, government grants, and cinemas.
- We can no longer properly differentiate between what is reality and what is fiction, therefore, we don’t.

- We do not take ourselves too seriously. The world owes us nothing, and no one has asked us to make films. We know we will gain nothing from cinema except poverty, loneliness, and darkness. Nor do we expect anything from anyone.
- We are not legally established, that is, we have no papers, that is, we do not exist. We are immigrants and foreigners; always.
- Vanity and self-indulgence are the great enemies of our times.
- We are marked by impossibility and failure.
- Aspiring YouTubers tend to be good crew members. They usually have cameras and lights, as well as being attentive and collaborative.
- The list of films made from these precepts can be consulted here: https://sebastiansantisteban.com/2024/05/10/lista-de-peliculas-dogma-b-24/
- If you liked this content, please share with your networks 😉
- With this manifesto, we give way to the creation of the collaborative and precarious film production company based in Barcelona (not legally established): Rumbo a Peor Films
- You can follow us on our Instagram profile: https://www.instagram.com/rumbo_a_peor_films/«
Amb el suport de l’Ajuntament del Barnavers-24












