Article 12 is a feature documentary on surveillance, privacy, hackers and the reach of technology into ordinary life, produced under the Bertha Foundation and nominated for Best Feature Documentary at the Locarno Film Festival. It takes its name from Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — the right to privacy — and asks what that article means once the infrastructure of everyday life is built to record.
It was directed, produced and edited by Juan Manuel Biaiñ, and became a catalyst for national discourse on digital rights and civil liberties. The film was developed through Talent Campus Script Station at the Berlinale, and was later featured by Dazed.
The whole film is below. It is the beginning of the line of inquiry that runs through everything since — how reality is surveilled, manufactured and sold, and who profits at each step.
The title is not decorative. Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights holds that no one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with their privacy, family, home or correspondence — a clause written in 1948, for a world of letters and front doors, and now applied to infrastructure that records by default. The film treats that gap as its subject: not whether surveillance is legal, but what a right to privacy can still mean once the recording is ambient, continuous and largely invisible to the people being recorded.
It was made at the point where these questions were still treated as specialist concerns rather than ordinary ones, which is part of why it travelled — from a Bertha Foundation production to a Locarno nomination for Best Feature Documentary, through development at the Berlinale Talent Campus Script Station, and into press coverage including Dazed. Watching it now, the argument it was making has stopped being speculative.
Everything since has extended the same line of inquiry. The surveillance and hacking work, the films on deception and fabricated realities, the investigations into power and extraction — all of it starts here, with the question of who is permitted to see, who is recorded, and who decides.