Filmmaker and builder, at the intersection of technology and power

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.