Biography
Sebastián C. Santisteban is a Colombian filmmaker and writer born in Guateque, Boyacá. His work is distinguished by a fusion of dark humor, social critique, and the deliberate blending and hybridization of genres. He seeks to combine the narrative depth of literature with the visual impact of cinema, creating experiences that invite critical reflection and are visually captivating. His cinematic approach is inspired by authors such as Federico Fellini, Lars von Trier, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and David Lynch. In the literary sphere, his style draws from Lacanian psychoanalysis and authors like Samuel Beckett, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and Jorge Luis Borges, with whom he shares an ironic and agonistic vision of reality. He currently resides (2025) in Barcelona, Spain, where he explores and promotes a new aesthetic current he has termed Tropical Psychotic Postexistentialism, through which he seeks to frame the development of his cinematic and literary projects that aspire to the discovery and establishment of a new voice aimed at a deeper understanding and expression of the malaises of our time and the ways they might be resisted.
Filmography
Ruinas Artificiales (In Development) — Feature film set in Barcelona that explores the boundaries between reality and simulation through the story of a dysfunctional team of filmmakers who are simultaneously making an experimental film while their own reality progressively disintegrates. It fuses metafiction, satire, psychological drama, and elements of thriller.
La Alegre Levedad de la Colombianidad (2025) — Meta-documentary that explores the contradictions of happiness through archival footage and experimental animation.
El Barnaverso (2024) — Satire on gentrification, mental health, and cultural diversity in a Barcelona situated in a supposed alternative universe.
Bel (2024) — Critique of artificial intelligence and manipulation on social networks.
Imaginarios, el goce de lo simple (2014) — Intimate and poetic portrait of the everyday life of high school students in Guateque, Boyacá.
His works have been selected and awarded at international festivals such as Future Film Festival, NIFF Navarra, and Absurd Film Festival, among others.
Literary Works
El Maluverso (or Tales of Existentialism for Reggaeton Lovers) — Sharp critique of contemporary pop culture that also delves into the meaning of life and madness.
MADLL — Novel about an adolescent suffering panic attacks at a festival in an emerald-mining town in the Colombian mountains.
On My Work
My cinematic and literary work emerges as a territory of confluences, a direct reflection of my own mestizo identity and nomadic experiences across diverse continents. This mestizaje is not merely cultural but also aesthetic and conceptual, manifesting in the deliberate hybridization of genres, techniques, and references that characterize my work. I am interested in exploring the boundaries between reality, fiction, and simulation; sanity and madness. My work draws nourishment from both the tradition of Latin American magical realism and European and Asian audiovisual experimentation, creating a language that rejects aesthetic purism in favor of genuinely diverse and heterogeneous expression. Dark humor and satire are fundamental tools in my work, allowing me to address complex themes such as mental health, loneliness in the age of hyperconnection, and the commodification of emotions, without falling into didacticism or moralism. I firmly believe that art must discomfort and destabilize as much as it entertains, offering not definitive answers but new questions that allow us to reconfigure our perception of the world. Ultimately, my work celebrates impurity, failure, and mestizaje as sources of creation and resistance. My work is an invitation to question everything: sanity, identity, madness, the aesthetic act, and the nature of the real itself.