The New 20's Manifest

The New 20's Film Movement is the salad bowl of filmmaking - focusing on encouraging filmmakers to collaborate and create multicultural content at its core.

The New 20's is the result of British and Danish film students who in 2017 questioned the thoughts and considerations in existing and new content - or the lack thereof— primarily focusing on misrepresentation, stereotyping, generalisation and the ideological propaganda behind a given media text.

The New 20's firmly believe that it is critical to general filmmaking to challenge societies and oneself. As filmmakers, one needs to be aware of the responsibilities and the consequences connected with the content produced, e.g. knowing the significant extent of implications associated with the influence a media text has on audiences and culture.

During the Berlinale 2018, the funding giant Creative Europe announced a plan regarding how they would deal with the prominent issues. The plan included relocating their funding schemes to benefit stories and productions focused on minorities. Regardless of the intention, as a result, the industry entered a "Box-Ticking"-era. An era reinforced by the nepotism that grounds the entire industry and excludes other voices from different background, cultures and the making of challenging content. 

The industry is a closed circle primarily dominated by one culture and class. Even now, in times of diverse and multicultural stories being in demand by the audience, stories are still supplied and told by people without the proper life experiences that are required to disclose such accounts in a relatable and authentic manner.

The New 20's is critical regarding contemporary content produced by the giants, especially those who allegedly claim to want to provide diverse content. The New 20's believe that, e.g. the overexposed story about middle-class issues and changing the main character's race is still just a story about middle-class problems with a new face. As well as the way film giants naively lack thought to the consequences of using negative stereotyping and generalisation.

 At the beginning of 2020, The New 20's questioned the approach and initiatives taken by the giants and regarded it inefficient. As a result, The New 20's formulated a set of guidelines emphasising authentic unheard voices and collaboration that may help elevate our societies for the better. Doing so in the belief, that if followed by new and existing filmmakers, the guidelines may allow for the needed change.

In the process of eliminating the nepotistic inner-circle, a new form of collaboration may be the solution by breaking the circle and bringing the unheard voices into one's team and in the process calling the end of Auteur Filmmaking. Embracing that filmmaking is a collaboration - The New 20's Film Movement will break with this one-sidedness (one cultural/ideological) approach and instead embrace that two minds are better than one both in the development phase as well as the production itself. 

The movement will, among many goals, aim to break with cultural barriers meaning to eliminate a single culture's dominance in a given project produced. Achieving multicultural representation may be done by attaching various people from different cultures in every project – and thereby creating content that is keeping the true and real identities in characters and the worlds we create (the salad bowl of filmmaking if you will). The reasons behind it are many, but for one, we hope this will help cope with the cultural differences regarding, i.e. achieving somewhat of an indirect colour blindness propaganda transparent in the content. Being conscious of our choices in filmmaking allows us to re-mould our society for the better. One of the critical goals of the New 20's - is to change the way we interact with each other across all of our differences. 

Unheard voices have got nothing to do with the colour of skin, gender or sexual orientation. It's about the experiences that have created one's identity, one's fears, culture and life - that is what unheard voices is about, and how The New 20's will break with the "Box-Ticking" era.

The New 20's counters "Box-Ticking", nepotism, unchallenging content and misrepresentation and is calling for a new generation of filmmaking to change in the core of the industry. By tasking, filmmakers to consider The New 20's Guidelines in their filmmaking The New 20's hope their films will inspire the audience to reflect on themselves and their behaviour. And by this, the content will become the incitement to change our society.