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Nothingness is our fashion, mother

The Hamlet Manifesto, Episode 1

A cinematic musical series by Hugo Noël Santander Ferreira

"Nothingness is our fashion, mother."

The first episode of The Hamlet Manifesto begins where all tragedy begins: in confession, in music, in autobiography.

Before Polonius preaches, before Claudius schemes, before Hamlet confronts the ghost of his father, the film opens with a song. The author himself steps into the frame, his voice carrying "Young Minds"—a lyrical prelude tracing the passage from philosophy to cinema, from Bogotá to Philadelphia, from a student's search for meaning to the birth of a radical Shakespearean experiment.

It is not spoken in dialogue, but sung.
It is not staged in a theatre, but unfolded through cinematic tableaux: bridges, penitentiary walls, limousines, industrial shores at magic hour.

Every text is sung.
Every image is a confrontation.
Every character is refracted through music.

This is Nothingness is our fashion, mother.

Hamlet sings on the Walt Whitman Bridge

Elsinor reimagined as a corporate empire

Autobiography as Overture

The introduction is not merely an author's note—it is a visual aria.

Hugo Noël Santander Ferreira recounts how Fernando, his mentor in Bogotá, redirected him from philosophy toward cinema. How Temple University became the laboratory of a new vision. How his first short, Po (Dust), already carried the DNA of Beckett, dreamscapes, and exile.

Sung against the backdrop of Philadelphia's streets and bridges, this origin song links the personal to the theatrical: Hamlet not as Elizabethan prince, but as Aldeano, a Colombian youth exiled to the United States by corporate fate. From the first sequence, the adaptation proclaims itself: Shakespeare's sixteenth-century Denmark is transfigured into a neocolonial corporate empire, where Elsinor is not a castle but a multinational.

The Walt Whitman Bridge as Stage

The first great monologue—"O, that this too too solid flesh would melt"—is staged not in a palace hall but on the Walt Whitman Bridge, overlooking the Delaware River.

The bridge itself becomes the depth of field: lines of steel vanishing into horizon, light falling golden across Hamlet's face at magic hour. He sings not to a court but to the river, to the sky, to the silence of Philadelphia's industrial edges.

"Nothingness is our fashion, mother."

The words are not despair but resistance. A refusal of false appearances. A statement that grief cannot be reduced to costumes, gestures, or profitable productivity.

Here the film sets its thesis: the struggle between being and seeming, truth and fabrication, memory and corporate rewriting.

Claudius as CEO, Polonius as Corporate Sage

The Claudius of this adaptation does not wear a crown. He wears a suit, steps out of a black Lincoln, and addresses the camera like a chief executive officer explaining mergers and acquisitions. His rhetoric is laced with corporate jargon, his mourning for his brother folded into strategy against Fortinbras Investment Company.

Laertes appears in the background, his lawsuit against Fortinbras reframed as a fight over Colombian oil and Bolivian coal. Gertrude too has traded her throne for an office, her guilt masked by feigned rationality.

And Polonius? He remains what he has always been: verbose, slippery, full of advice. But here his wisdom is jazz, syncopated and smooth, a father's lecture transfigured into a swing sermon. His words to Laertes—"Neither a borrower nor a lender be"—are delivered in the rhythm of a boardroom homily, a corporate catechism that flows into music.

Laertes and Ophelia: A Love Told Without Words

One of the most striking sequences of Episode 1 comes when Laertes admonishes Ophelia about Hamlet. In the original text, it is dialogue. Here, it is pure cinema.

Their relationship unfolds across visual variations:

• in psychiatric consultations, where their intimacy is coded as diagnosis and dependency,
• in cinema halls, where shared glances replace declarations,
• in bedrooms and private spaces, intimacy rendered as tenderness,
• and finally in the Fourth of July parade, where their bond is exposed to the eyes of the public, transformed into spectacle.

Laertes' caution thus becomes more than brotherly advice—it is a cinematic montage of how love moves from secrecy to display, from the private to the political, from whisper to parade float.

The Ghost in the Streets

When Bernardo and Horatio encounter the apparition, it is not on castle battlements but against the backdrop of the Philadelphia penitentiary. The ghost is mediated through an envelope of cash, an actor's silent performance, and the unease of transaction.

"Doesn't it look like our buried Protector?" Bernardo whispers.
But the protector here is not only a king—it is the memory of justice, already commodified.

The ghost scene becomes an allegory of corruption: the dead father's voice silenced, replaced by actors paid to embody him. The apparition is not only supernatural but financial, a mirror of how capital resurrects, buys, and sells memory.

Operatic Characters in Musical Genres

Each role is refracted through music:

• Hamlet sings fragile ballads of grief and rebellion.
• Claudius roars his authority through hard rock.
• Polonius counsels in jazz improvisation.
• Gertrude wraps her words in festive dissonance.
• Ophelia drifts into spectral synthwave, her love story already shaded by her coming madness.

The collision of genres produces a polyphonic clash: opera without borders, Shakespeare without a single voice.

Cinematic Figures and Iconography

Episode 1 introduces a visual lexicon of characters, sharply defined in cinematic close-ups:

• The Blonde Guard: black suit, dark sunglasses, Monroe-cut hair gleaming like platinum under the sun. She opens the Lincoln door with military grace.
• The White-Bearded Man: suit and silver tie, celestial blue shirt, descending from limousines like prophet and patriarch.
• The Slim Woman with Pearl Earrings: smiling warmly, light catching the pearls at her ears.
• The Fair Man in Beige Suit: alert, mid-speech, lighter tones cutting through darker suits.
• The Goateed Man in Trench Coat: sleek silhouette, voice ready to interject.

Each is filmed as if in a Martin Schoeller or Steve McCurry portrait—sharp, bokeh backgrounds, skin rendered in unforgiving clarity. Not characters only, but mythic presences, their arrival shifting entire scenes into tableau.

Nothingness as Fashion

The title phrase crystallizes in Hamlet's exchange with Gertrude:

GERTRUDE: Like me, you must accept everyone on earth must die, passing through nature to nothing.
HAMLET: Nothingness is our fashion, mother.

The line becomes the heart of the manifesto: nothingness is not resignation, but the mask that reveals truth. A way of standing against the corporate rewriting of grief, against the reduction of death to numbers on a balance sheet.

It is style, it is resistance, it is fashion.

Toward the Graveyard, Toward the Future

The episode closes with a shift to the graveyard, where mausoleums tower like cathedrals and the camera glides over statues and inscriptions. Overhead shots extend the tombs into infinity, under the full moon's light.

This visual coda anticipates the trajectory of the series: Hamlet's story will not remain bound by palaces, but will move through cemeteries, penitentiaries, limousines, desert sands. The visual grammar of tragedy will be rewritten into the language of cinema.

Conclusion: Episode 1 as Manifesto

Nothingness is our fashion, mother is not only the first episode of The Hamlet Manifesto. It is also the series' declaration of intent:

• To remake Shakespeare as cinema-opera.
• To stage power as corporate theatre.
• To reveal love and madness in images, not dialogue.
• To use music not as ornament, but as ontology—each character existing in genre, each scene sung into being.

This is Shakespeare without borders.
This is cinema as philosophy.
This is Hamlet for the twenty-first century.

Watch Episode 1 Now

Available on YouTube @SantanderCinemas

#HamletManifesto #NothingnessIsOurFashionMother #HamletUnbound #ShakespeareReimagined #OperaWithoutBorders #MusicalCinema #ModernHamlet #EclecticMusic #Hamlet2025 #CinematicPoetry #ExistentialCinema

Shakespeare in the Age of Terror: The Hamlet Manifesto (Part IV)

Philadelphia has rarely been the stage for Shakespeare. Yet with The Hamlet Manifesto (Part IV), Colombian filmmaker Hugo Noël Santander Ferreira relocates the Danish tragedy into the heart of the American city, using the Walt Whitman Bridge and the Delaware River as a backdrop for Hamlet’s existential despair. The fourth installment of this experimental series is more than an adaptation—it is a provocation, a bold reimagining of what Shakespeare can mean in the twenty-first century.

Gone is the familiar imagery of Elsinore Castle. Instead, the audience is confronted with a modern tableau: Cadillacs rolling in, corporate executives stepping out, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern carefully selecting weapons to escort Claudius, symbols of a society gripped by fear and the rhetoric of security. The staging evokes an unmistakable reference to an era defined by terrorism, surveillance, and the militarization of everyday life. By placing Shakespeare’s courtiers in the role of armed escorts, Santander Ferreira situates the play within a world that has normalized violence as part of governance.

The film remains faithful to the cadence of Shakespeare’s verse, but it is unafraid to weave in resonances of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and even Colombia’s Bucaramanga and Bogotá. Such juxtapositions destabilize the canon, reminding the viewer that Hamlet’s melancholy is not the possession of Elizabethan England alone but a global condition. It is the paralysis of youth who inherit debts instead of legacies, the mourning of communities dispossessed by political violence, and the disorientation of a world where democracy and tyranny are no longer easily distinguished.

Claudius is no longer the medieval usurper. Here, he is a corporate patriarch, flanked by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern not as comic foils but as professional enforcers. His dialogue reveals the logic of power: contracts, trustees, and reorganization of companies. Laertes, instead of a courtier returning from Paris, becomes a migrant worker negotiating his way back to Bogotá. Hamlet himself is caught between his filial duty and the crushing apparatus of profit, his grief dismissed by Claudius and Gertrude as inefficiency, stubbornness, and unmanly indulgence. Gertrude, once read as merely complicit, is transformed into a pedagogue of corporate stoicism, counseling her son to accept death as an inevitability while aligning his behavior with the interests of the company.

The mise-en-scène intensifies these tensions. The Walt Whitman Bridge, a structure that unites Pennsylvania and New Jersey, becomes a metaphor for suspension, passage, and liminality. Beneath it flows the Delaware, carrying away fragments of identity and memory. Against this industrial and urban landscape, Hamlet’s soliloquies acquire new meaning: his wish that “this too too solid flesh would melt” resonates with the anxieties of migrants, the alienation of precarious laborers, and the exhaustion of individuals navigating the global marketplace.

For scholars of Shakespeare, The Hamlet Manifesto offers fertile ground. It challenges adaptation theory by refusing the binary of fidelity versus modernization. Shakespeare’s text is intact, yet the world it inhabits is unrecognizable, infused with references to Latin American politics, corporate globalization, and the language of counterterrorism. This relocation compels a reconsideration of Hamlet as not only a European prince but a universal figure caught in the machinery of empire and capital. The film aligns with postcolonial readings of Shakespeare, suggesting that the tragedy speaks as urgently in Bogotá or Philadelphia as it does in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Santander Ferreira’s project also interrogates the performance of grief. Hamlet’s declaration, “I know not seems,” becomes a rebuke to a society where mourning must be packaged, disciplined, and rendered profitable. His refusal to conform to corporate demands for resilience exposes the absurdity of a culture that suppresses sorrow for the sake of productivity. In an age where even grief is commodified, Hamlet’s melancholy is not weakness but resistance.

The choice to stage the scene amid Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s weaponry crystallizes the film’s central critique. In a climate where governments and corporations invoke fear to justify surveillance and violence, Shakespeare’s tragedy is reborn as a commentary on our own precarious moment. Hamlet, the eternal student, becomes a witness to a world where trust is displaced by contracts, where family is undermined by profit, and where every shadow conceals the threat of terror.

The Hamlet Manifesto (Part IV) demonstrates that Shakespeare need not be embalmed in period costumes or academic reverence. Instead, his words can echo through bridges, highways, and boardrooms, unsettling audiences with their enduring force. Santander Ferreira reminds us that Hamlet’s story is not simply about a prince in Denmark but about all of us who live under structures of power, mourning, and fear.

The film positions itself not only as an artistic achievement but as a contribution to Shakespeare studies. By reimagining Hamlet in Philadelphia with Colombian resonances, Santander Ferreira has expanded the map of Shakespearean adaptation. It is a cinema of bridges—between North and South, past and present, art and

THE HAMLET MANIFESTO 3 — A Film by Hugo Noël Santander Ferreira - THAT T...

THE HAMLET MANIFESTO — A Film by Hugo Noël Santander Ferreira

SEQUENCE 3: "O, THAT THIS TOO TOO SOLID FLESH..."

In this striking third sequence, a modern Hamlet wanders the monumental spans of the Walt Whitman Bridge and gazes upon the thunderous Niagara Falls. Against these symbols of democracy and nature’s overwhelming force, he delivers Shakespeare’s iconic soliloquy — a raw meditation on grief, betrayal, and the unbearable weariness of existence. ► ABOUT THIS SCENE: The soliloquy is reframed against the American landscape. The bridge, named for the poet of the self and democracy, becomes a passage suspended between despair and endurance. The relentless power of Niagara Falls mirrors the torrent of Hamlet’s inner turmoil as he confronts his mother’s swift remarriage to his uncle. ► KEY THEMES: Shakespeare’s Hamlet | Modern Adaptation | Soliloquy on Screen | Existential Dread | Grief and Betrayal | Walt Whitman Bridge | Niagara Falls | Independent Film | Poetic Cinema ► FEATURING: Hugo Noël Santander Ferreira as Hamlet Adapted text from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Act 1, Scene 2) Original Score by Hugo Noël Santander Ferreira Subscribe for more sequences #TheHamletManifesto #HugoSantanderFerreira #Shakespeare #Hamlet #Soliloquy #IndieFilm #ArtHouseCinema #WaltWhitmanBridge #NiagaraFalls #Monologue #FilmAdaptation #PoeticCinema #Theater #ShakespeareOnFilm #Drama

Directed by Hugo Noël Santander Ferreira © All Rights Reserved. https://youtu.be/IJwSxcKy2uU

NO is the triumph of the battered middle class and the working class

   In this election I lost several friends; my stance against peace agreements manipulated for the benefit of the rise to power of the FARC, and the consolidation of a tight circle of rulers, indolent towards corruption has earned me several insults and two threatening phone calls. From the beginning I said that the great error of the process, unaccountably, but advantageously presented to the international community as a yes or no to a peace treaty, was the exclusion of the most dynamic sectors of society; that is, farmers, industrialists, entrepreneurs, workers, builders and urban unemployed. This great mass of voters who said no to these agreements; indeed they already expected a defeat foretold; after all the government had mobilized billions of pesos to ensure a resounding triumph of the YES. In the pages of Facebook and Twitter you still can read threatening messages. The most sinister items of the agreements was the creation of a special task force armed to track down and prosecute those who oppose the content of such agreements: Lenin's Cheka police couterpart. In other words, if the Colombian people despised by these politicians had not rejected such "Peace" agreement last Sunday, that very people would had been syndicated in not a too distant future. And that just for criticizing such Draconian agreements. Not just President Uribe, but also many friends, announced that the prison would be his fate, and taht by the mere fact of having expressed disagreement to the victorious peace agreements. To put it another way, what it felt was not that they were peace agreements as such, but a surrender of all Colombia to a bloody, guerrilla, a terrorist group guilty of crimes against humanity.

   And the campaign of bullying can only be measured by the exaggerated threats that have emerged by those who lost the plebiscite in the last hours. Senator Claudia Lopez tweeted that all dead from now on must fall on the heads of those who voted NO. She said that without even considering that every dead falls only on the head of the murderer who pressed the trigger or--as happened in Colombia, on the head of that man who commands a soldier from La Habana, to press the trigger. In fact no one among the ranks of the SI I know had even consider whether this defeat wasn't mainly due to having bullied and vilified as Idiots those who didn't agree with their hatreds. particularlly the world has seen how they boiled down against two figures of national life: President Uribe and former Attorney Ordoñez. What they were not able to consider in their intolerance, was that these two figures were certainly more respected among the working masses than the FARC leaders. 

   The illusion of the approval of those agreements, which were written to grant unprecedented authority to President Santos, was encouraged by a horde of journalists from newspapers and magazines well founded by State advertising. They were also fabulous trips, specialization courses and workshops to subsidize a post-conflict era: all promises for people who supported the YES vote. Such strategy was also rewarding intellectuals and university professors. I can count on my fingers,  in fact, artists, poets and writers who demonstrated against the falacious "Peace" agreement. Very few intellectuals, in fact, agreed to discuss my ideas, but they always ended either silent before my arguments, or insulting me, accusing me of being a paramilitary soldier. Fortunately my life in various countries, where dissenting ideas are respected, and where hegemony is taken as a symptom of fanaticism, kept me firm in my concepts, to the point that I decided to get away from the intellectual and university life for a year to import my ideas to the working class, the one that builds bridges and buildings in Colombia, the one threatened by a rising tide of taxes invariably intended--as it was said, to subsidize politicians and now criminal guerrillas.

   Yesterday I expressed my ideas against the threatening losers of the YES,and quite soon I got warnings from people who I didn't even greet in years. They told me that I should not be arrogant expressing my ideas, that's to say, that I should be humble before the bullying of those who insult me just for my choice to vote NO. Contrary to his fears, I think the middle class and working class are not the murderers, but rather the FARC. They just want a better, more prosperous, less humiliated life, without getting pedantic threats by unrepentant criminals. And above all, what the majority said last Sunday to President Santos is: no new taxes. As Professor C Dyke told me once, the only thing that worries the middle class are jobs and taxes, which must be reasonable. Governments who abuse one of these two pillars had been relentlessly put down. 

Turning Points 3, with Hugo Santander

On Casa Actores, A Wedding in the 1920s, on the ecological cost of Bogotá's development, The Superiority of the Neanderthal. Medea Bacatá, based on a true story,  a contemporary adaptation of Euripides' and Seneca's Medea. 

"Medea Bacatá" stages the love betrayal of a Colombian woman, a direct descendant of the legendary "Gaitana". As in most classical adaptaions, Medea attempts to murder her three children in the outskirts of Bacatá, Colombia.