In 2019, someone posted a photograph on an internet forum with no context: an endless room with yellow carpet, fluorescent lights, no windows, no way out. No signature, no authorship, no story, no explanation. What followed was one of the most fascinating experiments in collective storytelling in contemporary history: thousands of people around the world began building, anonymously and without any central authority, an entire universe of horror. That phenomenon is called Backrooms, and on June 5th its film adaptation premieres at CineCiutat. 

It is directed by Kane Parsons, the same young filmmaker who in 2022, at just sixteen years old, uploaded a found footage short film set in that universe to YouTube — a video that surpassed sixty-six million views. A24 (the production company that has redefined auteur horror cinema over the last fifteen years) entrusted him with the adaptation, and the result is, without any doubt, one of the most anticipated releases of the year. What makes Backrooms an exceptional object of cinematic analysis is not only its viral origins, but its narrative structure: there is no linear story, no single voice to impose order on the chaos. The story expands in every direction at once, like a collective database where every contribution reshapes the whole. It is, in that sense, the first great mythology born from the logic of the internet to make it to the big screen.

After the screening, Javi Pachón, director of CineCiutat, will be in conversation with Rodrigo Taramona. Taramona is a technology communicator, speaker and content creator specialising in the impact of technology on human beings — someone who has spent years explaining digital phenomena through their deepest cultural dimension. The conversation will explore non-linear narratives, collective authorship, and what happens when the imagery of the internet colonises the languages of cinema.

A session that will push at the boundaries between analogue horror and digital experience, between found footage as cinematic tradition and found footage as a new form of collective writing. Between what cinema has been and what the internet is forcing it to become.

Tickets here.

Conversant amb... is part of the Descobrint Cinema project, with funding from the Consell de Mallorca and the collaboration of the Ajuntament de Palma and CopyCorner.