In an era where synthetic polish and algorithmic perfection have become the visual default, the most radical gesture a filmmaker can make is to relinquish control. For Swedish House Mafia and Lykke Li’s Happiness Is So Sad, directing duo Theo Lindquist and Jorge G. Camarena traded the precision of traditional cinema rigs for the raw, unscripted intimacy of default-setting iPhones and CCTV feeds.
Casting local partygoers in Camarena’s hometown of Guadalajara, the directors engineered the conditions for a genuine night out—dismantling classic cinematic lighting in favor of harsh practicals and handing the cameras directly to the youth inside the room. The result is a visceral, multi-perspective portrait of young longing and fleeting euphoria, anchored by a custom multi-phone stereoscopic rig that freezes a pivotal kiss in subjective memory. Here, Lindquist and Camarena reflect on the anatomy of a “real” image in 2026, the chaotic reality of watching a staged party take on a life of its own, and why human intention remains the ultimate irreplaceable currency.
Athena Kuang: You’ve mentioned wanting to create something “unfakeable” in an era dominated by AI generation and hyper-polished cinematography. How do you define a “real” image in 2026?
Theo Lindquist: We’d frame it a little differently. All film is fake in some sense, so we weren’t chasing “unfakeable.” We wanted something that felt authentic and human at a time dominated by AI.
For me, a real image comes down to intention: one person communicating a real feeling to another. It started with what Swedish House Mafia and Lykke Li wanted to express in the music and lyrics, which our writing team decoded. Then we brought a lot of real people together for an event that actually happened, shot on real cameras, as a shared experience.
Everyone’s intentions were real. Nobody was regurgitating or copying references, which is a lot of what AI does so well. The people in it are themselves, too. We didn’t hire dancers to pretend to be at a party; we cast kids who’d be at that party anyway.
Jorge G. Camarena: For me, a real image is spontaneous and unpredictable. It’s imperfect in a human way, messy in a genuine way, rather than imperfection that’s been fabricated. I don’t think an image becomes real simply because it hasn’t been manipulated. I think it becomes meaningful when it carries a trace of something genuinely lived.
AK: There’s a distinct visual language to how we record our lives on phones: imperfect, shaky, intimate. What was your technique for letting the footage feel genuinely found rather than engineered?
TL: It started with casting. Jorge found genuine party kids in his hometown of Guadalajara, who already document their lives in much the same way. We had a script and a story, and for each scene we gave them a loose framework of what had to happen and the intention, but no direction on how to film it or what to do beyond that.
On a “regular” shoot we think about every frame: how to make it work, how to make it visually interesting, how it tells the story. At a real party, people just point their camera at what’s happening naturally, or at themselves for a selfie.
JGC: As filmmakers, we’re trained to control the image: the perfect composition, the perfect light, the perfect moment. People recording their own lives aren’t thinking about any of that. They’re reacting to something they want to remember or share.
It is a modern way of telling stories that has been emerging from social media for years, more intimate, with different framing, and we wanted to understand what it is. I think what’s fascinating is that younger generations are developing an entirely new visual language, almost unconsciously. They’ve grown up with cameras constantly present in their lives, so filming is no longer necessarily an event or a deliberate act of documentation. It’s become an extension of how they experience the world, how they communicate, and even how they remember.
TL: Yeah exactly, every day, millions of hours of personal stories are told through phones and selfies. It’s so commonplace on social media, yet professional filmmaking somehow treats it as irrelevant or inferior. But in many ways it’s the most relevant visual form of communication of our current time and culture. This generation doesn’t worry about burning film or tape, so they record everything. We embraced that sense of freedom by filming constantly and jumping between many points of view on the party. Everyone’s a camera, and wherever you are, you’re also in the background of someone else’s video.
Our cinematographer Diego first lit the party in a classically “beautiful” music video way, with soft, colourful, cinematic lighting, and we had to ask him to undo it all, as much as we liked it. We had to go back to practicals and crappy lighting, for everything to feel ordinary and real.
Technically, we shot on iPhones on default settings. No special apps, no filters, nothing to make it look better than a phone. I never understood why people decide to shoot something on a phone but then try their best to make it look like a cinema camera, employing special adapters, using custom capture apps. We just wanted it to be true to what it is.
AK: You wired a house with CCTV and disguised your crew as partygoers. What was the most chaotic thing you watched happen on those monitors?
TL: We set up a fire scene with our actor putting it out, and although we had fire safety people on standby, the shot only allowed for two takes. A room full of people dancing had to let our actor run through the party with an extinguisher in time to put the fire out before it became a real one. The apartment was filling with smoke, the smell of burning and extinguisher fumes. Before the fire was fully out on the take we eventually used the extinguisher died. But we got what we needed.
The other was the fight. We’d choreographed it with two professional stunt performers, both professional MMA fighters from Mexico. The partygoers got really into it and were ready to jump in, almost too ready. We started worrying they’d break the choreography or catch an accidental punch.
JGC: There was something fascinating about watching the monitors and realizing the party had taken on a life of its own. People were dancing, arguing and laughing, and there were great moments we could never have choreographed down to the detail.
We weren’t checking what was on the phones. We were just watching the action play out and hoping we had it. Letting go a little was part of the experience.
AK: For “Happiness Is So Sad,” you cast local kids from Guadalajara. How did you get them to stop acting for the camera and just throw a party?
JGC: We threw a party. They weren’t actors, they were partygoers from a scene in Guadalajara, and we told them we were all going to make a music video together. They were also the ones filming, so they were involved from every angle.
Then things we couldn’t control started to happen. Some of them became friends. Real life started happening inside the circumstances we’d set up, and that was very cool to watch. We wanted to create the conditions for something real to happen, something that was genuinely experienced rather than simply performed.
TL: We never asked them to act, so we never had to get them to stop. We gave them the actions, what to shoot and said go. It wasn’t a continuous party either; it kept stopping and starting. What amazed us was how easily they moved in and out of it. We’d made the house feel like a party, and when we gave the go-ahead and the DJ started blasting music, they went from sitting around to being fully in the moment. It was amazing to witness. They weren’t jaded. You could tell they were enjoying the moment, being a part of it, and that made it feel authentic.
To be clear, this wasn’t a documentary. It was staged, nobody was really drinking, and plenty of footage didn’t feel real, so the edit was also about selecting the best moments.
AK: The 3D multi-phone rig for the kiss is the one moment that breaks reality. How did you actually build that rig, and why did that moment need to feel different?
TL: Partly because we wanted one moment in the video to show this set up wasn’t a documentary. But the main reason is the story. The film is about Benny. He finally kisses the girl he’s been in love with for the longest time (because her friends’ dare her, something he doesn’t understand), only to have his future hopes taken away when she goes off with someone else. At the end he has to decide whether to be upset or re-claim the moment as something worth remembering in a positive light.
That memory could be tragic, or it could be joyful: he did get to kiss the girl he loved, even if only for an instant. There’s sadness in it, but something sweet too. We wanted to seal that memory in a subjective way that felt epic and larger than life, like memory does sometimes, and in a way that read as differently from the rest of the video, which was more realistic.
Thinking about what techniques might create that sense of memory. It took me back to something I’d been experimenting with over a decade ago, when I was working on hologram films and stereoscopic photography. I’d never used this experiment in a video, and the project felt like a good moment to bring it out.
As for how: I gave the plans to our cinematographer, and he built the rig from multiple phones positioned side by side. We’ll be posting making-of clips soon, on our Instagrams and elsewhere.
With generative AI tools making it trivial to simulate ultra-polished, hyper-real visuals, do you think the value of cinema is shifting away from technical perfection and toward deliberate imperfection?
TL: I don’t think cinema is shifting from technical perfection to deliberate imperfection, but I do think what we value is changing. Technical perfection, in the traditional visual sense, is becoming more easily accessible with ai, so it won’t be what we’re aiming for anymore. The desire for imperfection feels more like a reaction to the moment we’re in, but not the point.
What will matter is what you say and how you say it. Intention, good ideas and a clearly communicated insight or point of view.
JGC: I agree. Imperfection can be just as artificial as perfection: you can manufacture a shaky camera, and you can manufacture the lighting.
For me it’s always been about the human perspective behind the image. The intention, the sensitivity, the contradictions and emotions, the things we choose to observe and the things we accidentally discover.