I love sensorial cinema, and this story demands it. What matters to me is the sensation of that first scene, letting the audience wonder about the answers that will arrive later. OPENMIND is psychological science fiction, so we need to travel through the inner world of each character. I want to transport the audience into a new world, exactly the way OM transports its users.

 

I pay close attention to introductions. When a character first appears, there is something in their behaviour that reveals their nature. Clara seeks order to avoid suffering, and that small gesture is the seed of her whole arc — it points to the inner learning she has to undergo.

 

If memory can be edited by us or someone external to us, what happens to identity — to consciousness itself? That question became the seed of the whole story. This isn’t a fantasy disconnected from the present. Brain-interface technology already exists, and it is moving fast: neuroscience labs are learning to locate and manipulate the engrams where individual memories are stored. The film sits inside that danger — who controls these technologies, and who owns the data. No technology is good or bad in itself; everything depends on how we use it. But we have to ask these questions now, to protect individual memory and identity before that power fully exists.

 

Absolutely. I know people in the tech world, and many of them genuinely want to improve humanity — but it is very hard to control how an invention will be used, or who ends up making the global decisions about it. David creates OM to heal his own traumas, and everyone else’s. He dreams of a life without pain and believes technology can make us better. But he ends up used by people far more powerful, so his story works as a cautionary tale.

 

The inspiration comes from something deeply personal, on two levels. The first is social: I grew up under a government that censored information and public opinion as a tool of control, so I have always told stories about the right to freedom, and the consequences of losing it. The second is my own journey through various forms of therapy — several of the scenes Clara lives through come from my own experience, a healing journey that still continues. Clara’s path connects with many traditions, from the Buddhist teachings toward non-attachment to the psychological work of dissolving old narratives. Almost every spiritual initiation and healing practice asks the same thing: that we confront our worst fears and hardest memories, and change the story we tell ourselves about them, so we can finally let them go. Each door inside OM has a very personal meaning for me, but each is left deliberately open — that discovery belongs to the audience.

 

Before writing the screenplay, I built a future world in detail: the political, social, and technological background the story lives in. The narrative world gives the story its scale, and Clara gives it its heartbeat. OPENMIND is told through Clara’s eyes — someone who deeply values history, memory, and human connection, everything at risk of disappearing in that near future. We enter this world through her weaknesses and strengths, her attachments and her empathy. She is real, with real conflicts and this is a story about her inner transformation, and how that changes the world around her.

 

The world of OM has specific rules, limits, and a logic to how you navigate it. It isn’t magic. The only way for Clara to reach what she wants is to pass through deep levels of learning, confronting who she truly is — and that carries a physical and mental cost. Some things can’t be reversed and some problems can’t be solved at all. That logic applies in every door. There are also clear rules governing GAIA, the AI behind OM. She has a core she cannot violate, things she cannot do because it goes against her nature. She isn’t malevolent, and she isn’t the enemy. In this story, both the light and the darkness come from the human soul; technology only amplifies them.

 

Yes, deconstruction is at the heart of this story. When Clara leaves the city she knows, everything she believed to be real is thrown into question, and she evolves because of it. She has to confront her own identity, her memories, her ideology, her attachments. Her quest becomes not only about saving David, but becoming someone new — someone able to face what is coming.

 

There are many visual influences, from the surrealism of Salvador Dalí to the cinema of Tarkovsky, Satoshi Kon, and David Lynch. For me, the power of cinema is not only to express the external world, but to render what lives inside our minds and dreams. That dreamlike texture is the story’s principal visual signature.

 

It’s a warning, but not a full dystopia — a story of possibilities, and of learning. It isn’t pessimistic, and it isn’t naïve. I hope it lands somewhere in between. Optimism is more interesting to me at this point in my life, and we need stories that are complex but still give us hope. If we do the inner work, and make the right decisions now, we will be here far longer. We’re just in the first act of our movie.