Gian Bonacchi

In a not-so-alternative universe, a series of advertisements promote the beauty of living in idyllic Barcelona while exploring the futility, vanity, and madness of our absurd times.

A group of amateur filmmakers begins an experimental project that gradually destroys their lives. As they shoot a fiction about a writer trapped with a monolith trying to create real beings through her writing, the boundary between what they're filming and what they're living disintegrates. The characters from the fiction begin to contaminate reality, until they become indistinguishable. Made in Barcelona on zero budget with the latest AI models applied to VFX, in the lineage of Dogma 95 and the Nouvelle Vague. Artificial Ruins is at once satire and dark comedy: a choral portrait of four artists destroying themselves, and a meditation on the question of our era: what is still human when the machine writes, generates, and edits faster than we can think?

When two out-of-shape stoners run out of money, they join a heavyweight lifting competition in hopes of winning the cash prize.