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.
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.
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:
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
