Synopsis
A group of amateur filmmakers initiate an experimental film project that progressively destroys their lives. Led by an American consultant with multiple personalities, the team includes a screenwriter who writes with AI, a shamanic actress who does family constellations, an undocumented immigrant editor who sells sex online, a Marxist revolutionary TikToker, and other equally dysfunctional characters. While they film their movie about a writer trapped with a monolith, the boundary between the reality of the shoot and the fiction they are filming blurs in catastrophic and absurd ways.
Director’s Note
There’s a moment in every production process when a film stops being a product of the author’s mind and starts to exist on its own, like a living organism that no longer depends on its creators. Artificial Ruins is a film about a group of amateur filmmakers trying to make a movie. Its premise is simple, but what happens to them is not.
As they film a fiction about a writer trapped with a monolith trying to create real beings through her writing, the boundary between what they are shooting and what they are living disintegrates. The characters of the fiction start to contaminate reality, until they become indistinguishable.
Artificial intelligence traverses the film at multiple levels. It’s in the writing of the fiction within the fiction, which is the product of a machine to which the screenwriter (deceitfully) delegates his work. It’s in the image; in entire sequences generated with AI to create striking visual effects that will later be criticized by the same characters. And it’s in the underlying question of the film (and one of the great questions of our time): what is «human» when most of the experiences and content we consume daily are created by an algorithm?
In this regard, no answer is given, but rather a sensation is conveyed—sometimes euphoric, sometimes uncomfortable—that of filming from within a revolution that we still haven’t finished naming or understanding, and that this bewilderment is, at least for now, the most honest material with which to work.
Technical Details
Direction & Screenplay: Sebastián C. Santisteban
Production: Gian Bonacchi, Consuelo Monsalve, Sebastián C. Santisteban, Rocio Vecco
Cinematography: Nahuel Beade, Daniel De La Latra
Editing: Petar Angelov, Sebastián C. Santisteban
Music: Roman Schoenbichler
Format: Feature Film
Country: Spain / Colombia
Status: In distribution