The film’s Baudelairean title introduces a historical tension between poetry and prose. Where do you locate poetry and where do you locate prose in these TikTok videos?
What struck us about many videos on TikTok was that, in their ingenuity, they sometimes achieve the elusive goal of cinematic modernism: a kind of pure filmmaking where rhythm, light, gesture, or fleeting impressions spark unexpected emotional responses. These pieces sometimes capture a spiritual intensity or comedic vitality that rivals even the most carefully crafted moments in established cinema or international slapstick. This is why we tend to associate them with the poetic mode. Poetry, for us, emerges precisely in these moments when a video exceeds its immediate purpose and produces an affect, an image, or a sensation that cannot be reduced to information or narrative alone.
At the same time, we locate prose in the everyday reality from which these videos emerge. These works—often raw and fragmentary—foreground presence over plot, offering glimpses into lived experience that are as performative as they are observational. They provide rare access to the intimate realities of people from all corners of the country—and even the world—often in ways that feel more direct or genuine than traditional media.
What interests us most is the constant movement between these two dimensions. On TikTok, the most banal situation can suddenly become poetic, while the most stylized performance often remains deeply rooted in everyday experience. The platform’s algorithmic logic intensifies this dynamic, functioning as an endless scroll of attractions, sensations, and surprises. Yet within this flow, moments of reflexivity, social commentary, and aesthetic experimentation continually emerge, challenging the boundaries of documentary, performance, and experimental cinema. In this light, TikTok becomes more than a platform for entertainment; it operates as a living, decentralized cinema—one that invites us to reconsider the cinematic impulse in the age of the feed.
Although TikTok is a global platform, you narrow your focus to Romania, and more specifically to rural Romania. How does the film position itself in relation to the role of social media in the formation of new political communities and in the current dysfunctions of democracy?
Our primary interest was not to make a direct statement about democracy or political mobilization. However, the political context in Romania inevitably became part of how we understood the material and played a significant role in sparking our interest in the platform.
Following the cancellation of Romania’s 2024 presidential elections, TikTok emerged as an unexpected yet central arena for political expression. Users across the country—including many from rural areas and communities that are often underrepresented in mainstream media—used the platform to circulate content ranging from overt political propaganda to personal reflections and everyday concerns. In that sense, TikTok clearly functions as a space where new political communities can form: people connect around shared anxieties, beliefs, identities, and narratives, often outside traditional political institutions or media channels.
At the same time, the Romanian case also exposed some of the dysfunctions of contemporary democracy. Public debate increasingly unfolded within algorithmically curated environments, where visibility is determined less by established political structures than by platform dynamics. During the first round of the elections, Romania may have become the first country where the leading candidate was virtually unknown outside TikTok, his popularity having been shaped largely through the platform and its algorithmic circulation. This raised important questions about how political legitimacy, public opinion, and democratic participation are being transformed by social media.
What interested us, however, was less the immediate political controversy and more what it revealed about the emergence of a new audiovisual culture. As we followed the political discourse on TikTok, we began to see strong parallels with early cinema, particularly through Tom Gunning’s notion of the “cinema of attractions.” Like many early films, TikTok privileges immediacy, performance, direct address, and emotional impact over narrative complexity. The political content circulating on the platform often operates through these same mechanisms, producing forms of engagement that are highly affective and participatory.
The film therefore does not take a clear position for or against social media. Instead, it observes how TikTok has become a powerful space where visibility, community, and political expression are being renegotiated. It gives a voice to people who have not been trained in audiovisual production and who often come from rural or marginalized backgrounds. Their videos can reach and influence audiences on a scale that many forms of art cinema cannot. Whether this development strengthens democracy or contributes to its fragmentation remains an open question.
What place do you think these videos occupy within the history of cinema? You just talked about “cinema of attractions”, those films of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries looked down upon by cultural elites but avidly consumed by the public of the time. Are these videos the primitive embryo of something that, like cinema itself, could evolve in unexpected ways?
Yes, we do see strong affinities between the aesthetic mode of TikTok videos and early cinema, particularly the “cinema of attractions,” in the sense described by Tom Gunning: a form of audiovisual expression based on direct address, immediacy, spectacle, and an unmediated relationship with the viewer. In both cases, we are dealing with a less codified system of representation and with a context that allows a much broader range of individuals to present their own views of the world.
At the same time, what distinguishes TikTok is precisely the radical expansion of this condition. Production is no longer concentrated in the hands of a few, but distributed across millions of users, which dissolves the clear boundary between producers and audiences. This leads to a high degree of repetition and unevenness: many videos are ephemeral, derivative, or artistically unremarkable.
However, we would be cautious about treating these videos only as a primitive stage or as an “embryo” of something yet to come. While some may point toward future forms of audiovisual expression, many are already fully formed in their own terms. They are not merely transitional objects awaiting cinematic maturity; rather, they function as complete gestures that produce immediate effects—affective, comedic, poetic, or observational.
In this sense, they should not only be understood as part of a linear history of cinema, but also as constituting a distinct mode of expression in their own right, one that coexists with but is not reducible to the evolution of cinematic language.
Do these videos nourish your cinematic practice or your thinking about cinema? In other words, do you find in them a valid aesthetic source for your own artistic developments?
At a certain level, yes, very much so. These videos have nourished both our thinking about cinema and, indirectly, our own artistic practice. What fascinates us is their freshness and spontaneity, their ability to reveal small artistic gestures and fragments of reality that would otherwise most likely remain invisible to the trained eyes of cinephiles or film professionals.
There is a significant difference between observing a reality from the outside and expressing it from within. Many TikTok creators are not working with established audiovisual traditions, cinematic references, or professional tools. Their relationship to image-making is often intuitive rather than learned, and this can produce surprising formal inventions, unexpected rhythms, and highly personal ways of representing everyday life.
For us, these videos are not necessarily a model to imitate, but they are a valuable aesthetic and anthropological source. They remind us that cinema does not belong exclusively to filmmakers, and that compelling forms of visual expression can emerge far from institutional or artistic contexts. In many ways, they extend the work that filmmakers around the world have done in trying to understand particular communities, sensibilities, and realities, while offering a more immediate perspective from within those worlds themselves.
More broadly, they encourage us to rethink what cinema can be today. They challenge conventional distinctions between amateur and professional production, between documentation and performance, and between artistic intention and spontaneous creation. In that sense, they are not only an object of study for us, but also a genuine source of inspiration.
In general, TikTok videos are self-contained units, or monads: single shots. Yet some particularly inventive or charismatic uses of the platform manage to transcend this limitation and introduce forms of editing in one way or another; and of course, you yourselves reintroduce editing in your film. Could you speak about the role of editing both in the TikTok videos you selected and in your own film?
What emerges on TikTok is a sprawling archive of audiovisual expression that blurs the boundaries between amateurism and artistry. Many creators, working outside institutional frameworks, intuitively adopt formal strategies that at times recall both early cinema and strands of experimental and documentary practice. One-shot takes, found-footage aesthetics, montage effects achieved within the frame or through sound, the creative use of text over image or of found footage material, and diaristic or performative modes all resonate with traditions in avant-garde and nonfiction film.
At the same time, the platform tends to favor self-contained units—short, autonomous fragments that function almost like monads, as you already observed. Each video is usually complete in itself, relying less on sequential development than on immediacy and impact. Yet precisely within this apparent limitation, some creators manage to introduce forms of editing through inventive internal structures, temporal ruptures, or layered audiovisual composition.
Our film reintroduces montage as a way of responding to this condition. By selecting and re-editing these materials, we shift them from isolated units into relations—creating echoes, contrasts, and thematic or affective connections between videos. Editing allows us to reveal continuities that are not always visible within the platform itself, and maybe to construct a second level of meaning that emerges from juxtaposition.
In this sense, our film reactivates the platform’s fragmentation and algorithmic flow, not by imposing a traditional narrative, but by constructing constellations of sequences that open up new ways of seeing these materials together.
The film is structured into several chapters identified simply by numbers. Could you comment on this organization and on the function of the different sections? For instance, the final chapter seems to revolve around the new possibilities opened up by artificial intelligence in image-making, and more specifically by deepfake technologies.
The chapter structure was conceived less as a rigid narrative progression and more as a way of organizing and highlighting different modes of expression that emerge on TikTok. Rather than grouping the videos according to themes or social categories, we wanted each section to foreground a particular relationship to the image, to performance, and to the camera.
The film begins with videos that are closer to documentary observation and everyday self-representation, before moving toward more performative gestures and intelligent or striking actions staged for the camera. Other chapters focus on short narrative forms, often infused with camp sensibilities and sometimes echoing the irreverent spirit of underground filmmakers such as John Waters, while others embrace a vulgar or slapstick humor whose raw and grotesque energy can feel surprisingly radical in relation to contemporary cinematic comedy. We then arrive at a chapter in which dance and music become the central expressive forces, foregrounding rhythm, movement, and bodily presence.
The final chapter, centered on AI-generated and deepfake imagery, serves both as a culmination and as an opening. Throughout the programme, we are interested in TikTok as a space where people continuously reinvent themselves through images and performances. The emergence of AI tools pushes this logic even further, blurring the boundaries between documentation and fabrication, identity and simulation. Rather than presenting these technologies simply as a threat or a novelty, we were interested in how they extend the platform’s culture of transformation and image-play, while also raising new questions about authenticity, authorship, and representation.
More broadly, the progression of the chapters reflects our interest in TikTok as a new audiovisual ecosystem. The works offer a window into realities often inaccessible to artists while simultaneously producing highly imaginative and fabricated worlds. What is especially striking is the often unconscious sophistication of many creators, who compose naïve yet surreal images, frame themselves in esoteric or ritualistic ways, or invent wildly original comic situations. Across all the chapters, we wanted to show how these creators develop new visual languages that sometimes can be as emotionally powerful, inventive, and formally surprising as those found in more established cinematic traditions.
Interviewed by Manuel Asín
