Juan Manuel Biaiñ

Filmmaker · Founder

El Comandante

Short Film · Fiction · 2026 — Dir. · Writer · Ed.

A pirate broadcast that never aired. A commander in aviator sunglasses interrupts the evening news to tell a country it has been sold, port by port, field by field, while it watched the football. It opens on the soundstage where he is being made up, and ends there.

Written as a screenplay and directed without a crew, a camera or a location, through a system built for the purpose.

[ Watch on YouTube ]

Unraveling Inconvenient Truths

I came up on the hacker ethic — the belief that you have a right to see how the machine works. For fifteen years I've turned that into film: surveillance, deception, and the hidden architecture of power. Now I build the tools that show the wires.

About

Juan Manuel Biaiñ works at the intersection of technology and power — as a filmmaker, and now as a builder.

He was drawn to computers young, by the hacker movement and its conviction that the workings of any system should be open to scrutiny. That conviction outlasted the day job: for over a decade he worked inside corporate IT, keeping the systems of oil, pharmaceutical and financial giants running — a decade spent watching, from the inside, how powerful institutions engineer what the public sees.

That is the subject he has pursued ever since. Across fifteen years and 70+ films — for the Bertha Foundation, VICE, Al Jazeera and others — his work exposes how reality is surveilled, manufactured, and sold: the machinery of persuasion, and the people who profit from it. Surveillance, propaganda, psyops, the manufacture of news. Article 12: Waking Up in a Surveillance Society (Bertha Foundation; nominated at Locarno) forced surveillance and digital rights into public debate. The same refusal to accept the surface runs through his work on hacking, deception and hidden power, and into his debut narrative feature, Anuk's Fix (Biotech).

That inquiry now turns on the tools themselves. Through Y-O-X, he builds technology for AI-generated narrative — and makes films that expose their own machinery even as they use it.

Practice: Two forms, one question.

I work in film and in software now, around a single question: how reality gets made, surveilled, and sold — and who controls the machine.

  • Films: Documentary and narrative features — from inquiry to screen.
  • Tools: Building Y-O-X, systems and infrastructure for AI-generated narrative.

Selected Work

1. Article 12

Roles: Dir. / Prod. / Ed.

Bertha Foundation produced documentary nominated at Locarno International Film Festival on surveillance and digital rights.

2. Can I Hack It? (Mr. Robot)

A three-part documentary campaign for Amazon Prime exploring ethical hacking, surveillance, and digital intrusion through Mr. Robot's universe.

3. Anuk's Fix (Biotech)

Roles: Dir. / Exec Prod. / Ed.

A live-action feature exploring the moral questions of biotechnology and human autonomy.

4. High Society

Roles: Prod. / Ed.

An unflinching Vice exploration into subcultures at the margins and clandestine economies.

5. Ethiopia's Last Crocodile Hunters

A nocturnal portrait of the Dassanach tribe on Lake Turkana documenting a vanishing tradition.

6. Fakes, Frauds & Scammers

An episodic investigation into deception, counterfeit empires, and identity fabrication.

Filmography & Structured Inquiry across 70+ Films

Roles vary — selected directing, producing and editing credits. Full detail on IMDb.

1. Surveillance & Hacking

Inquiries into digital rights, cyber infrastructure, intelligence, and the hidden architecture of tech power.

  • Anuk's Fix (Biotech) — Narrative Feature (In Post-Production)
  • Article 12: Waking Up in a Surveillance Society — Bertha Foundation (Locarno Nominee)
  • Rebel Geeks: Hacking Madrid — Al Jazeera
  • Phone Hackers: Britain's Secret Surveillance — Vice News
  • How Hackers Could Wirelessly Bug Your Office — Amazon Prime / Mr. Robot
  • Watch Researchers Hack a Surgical Robot — Amazon Prime / Mr. Robot
  • Hacking Passports and Credit Cards with Major Malfunction — Amazon Prime / Mr. Robot
  • Meet the Targeted Individual Community — Vice

2. Deception & Fabrication

Investigating manufactured realities, media hoaxes, corporate greenwashing, and artificial prestige.

  • TripAdvisor's #1 Fake Restaurant (The Shed at Dulwich) — Vice (Viral Phenomenon)
  • The Two Scottish Rappers Who Conned the World — Fakes, Frauds & Scammers
  • Max the Forger: Specialized in Faking Famous Art — Fakes, Frauds & Scammers
  • Smog + Mirrors: How The Oil Industry Brainwashes You — Vice

3. Power & Extraction

Exposing institutional corruption, state overreach, corporate exploitation, and economic violence.

  • The Ex-Undercover Cop Exposing UK Police Corruption — Vice
  • Cartels Are Making Millions on Fentanyl-Laced Medicine — Vice
  • The Deadliest Cartel in Mexico — The War on Drugs
  • Latin America's Deadliest Place to Be a Woman — Crimewave
  • Ethiopia: Voices of Resistance — Independent

4. Culture & Subcultures

Counter-narratives, youth movements, underground music, and global street phenomena.

  • Buying Drugs Over Snapchat — High Society
  • GHB: The Party Drug Killing Ravers — Vice
  • Top Boy: How Drake Saved the Greatest Show on TV — Noisey
  • The Definitive A-Z Of The UK Right Now — i-D

Credentials & Press

"Waking up in a surveillance society — a catalyst for national discourse on digital rights, privacy, and civil liberties." — Dazed Digital
  • Best Feature Documentary Nominee — Locarno International Film Festival
  • Talent Campus Script Station — Berlinale
  • Video Team of the Year — Digiday & Online Media Awards
  • Affiliations: British Film Editors (BFE), National Union of Journalists (NUJ)

Contact

Email: hello@biain.com

For film enquiries, collaborations, and Y-O-X.

Locations: London / Buenos Aires / Remote