Cris's desperate search for a flat takes a strange turn when she hands over a tourist apartment to a former lover.
Downtown Flat (Piso en el centro) is a 15-minute dramedy about the anxieties and contradictions of being young in a big city: the housing crisis and the culture of immediacy, told without fear of discomfort.
Genre: Dramedy
Running time: 15 minutes
Languages: Spanish, Catalan and English
We have already self-financed €8,000 to produce it. With this campaign we want to take it further in both professionalism and quality, and the €10,000 will go towards:
Better camera and lighting gear.
A more considered art direction.
Better wages for the crew.
Professional-level post-production.
Distribution to festivals around the world.
The story
Cris works at a touristic apartment management firm in the heart of Barcelona. She is being forced out of her flat, but she's in denial: in the meantime, she moves into the empty flats her firm manages.
Her plan falls apart when the flat she's staying in gets booked at the last minute. The client is Vivian, an old flame who left the city three years ago.
Get exclusive rewards
Downtown Flat is already happening, and your support is what will let us make it the way it's meant to be made.
To make it easy, we've set up contribution tiers, pick the one it suits you best. Every tier comes with its own rewards, and the higher you go, the more you get. Pick the one that suits you (choosing one isn't mandatory) and help us make the film as intended.
Rewards:
House (€500)
Featured credit as Associate Producer
Booklet of the shooting script/storyboard put together by the director and the director of photography, with a few words from each.
3 one-of-a-kind prints of one of the analogue photos captured during the shoot (delivered by post or in person).
Digital copy of the final script.
Invitation to a screening before the festival premiere with a Q&A with the director and members of the crew/cast (in person or online).
Gallery of exclusive behind-the-scenes photos shot on analogue film (High definition, digital format).
Gallery of digital photos from the shoot (High definition, digital format).
Official poster of the short film (Digital format).
Private digital screening link before its premiere
Physical poster of the project
Your name in the end credits of the short film.
Penthouse (€150)
One-of-a-kind print of one of the analogue photos captured during the shoot (delivered by post or in person).
Digital copy of the final script.
Invitation to a screening before the festival premiere with a Q&A with the director and members of the crew/cast (in person or online).
Gallery of exclusive behind-the-scenes photos shot on analogue film (High definition, digital format).
Gallery of digital photos from the shoot (High definition, digital format).
Official poster of the short film (Digital format).
Private digital screening link before its premiere
Physical poster of the project
Your name in the end credits of the short film.
Condo (€100)
Invitation to a screening before the festival premiere with a Q&A with the director and members of the crew/cast (in person or online).
Gallery of exclusive behind-the-scenes photos shot on analogue film (High definition, digital format).
Gallery of digital photos from the shoot (High definition, digital format).
Official poster of the short film (Digital format).
Private digital screening link before its premiere
Digital Poster of the project
Your name in the end credits of the short film.
Sixty m2 apartment (€60)
Gallery of digital photos from the shoot (High definition, digital format).
Official poster of the short film (Digital format).
Private digital screening link before its premiere
Digital Poster of the project
Your name in the end credits of the short film.
Studio Apartment (€30)
Private digital screening link before its premiere.
Your name in the end credits of the short film.
Bedroom - Three Roommates (€15)
- Your name in the end credits of the short film.
Why this short film
Downtown Flat explores the housing crisis and the culture of immediacy without fear of discomfort.
Finding decent housing takes effort and dedication, but our culture pushes us in the opposite direction.
Algorithms impose a rhythm of instant, ephemeral gratification: we give a news story about a natural disaster the same amount of time as an ad for a new pair of sneakers. That digital space has infected everyday life and has taught us to treat everything with the same liquidity.
Cris lives in that contradiction. She is trying to live in a big city, moving from flat to flat, and she resents the people who treat Barcelona as an amusement park, even though part of her can't resist Vivian. It's like going to a housing protest and to Primavera Sound in the same month.
Instead of facing her situation, she chases a romance. Instead of looking for a home in her own city, she considers moving to another country. We move away from victimhood to create a more unsettling portrait of the contemporary condition.
She works at a touristic apartment management firm, a true reflection of how the ephemeral aspects of technology have seeped into daily life with hundreds of apartments being occupied in short stints rather than as homes.
How we'll tell it
We draw on the uncomfortable intimacy of John Cassavetes and the late-twenties anxiety of works like Fleabag, and bring them into our post-digital era with a mixed-media approach.
Since the film tells a contemporary story, it's important to include contemporary formats into the form of the project itself. We open with a the recreation of a video any Barcelona local will recognise: a group of tourists trying to film themselves coming out of the Sagrada Família metro station.
From there, the fiction shoot is combined with footage filmed on the characters' own phones as they roam a tourism-ridden Barcelona as if it were an amusement park. Notifications and text conversations appear over the image, given that our phones are now part of our everyday lives.
The rest of the film seeks the feeling of witnessing moments we shouldn't be seeing. To achieve this we use long lenses that compress space and trap the viewer in the discomfort of each encounter.
The sound follows the same logic: a cacophonous sound design that reflects the rhythm of a big city, accompanied by a subtle score that works in concert with the sounds of the city.
Who we are
We are Alberto and Ignacio.
Alberto Orive, our director, comes from art direction, where he helped raise $5,000 for his thesis film. He has produced and directed commercials for brands like Adidas and music videos for indie rock bands from Barcelona, always focused on social themes and adding his personal touch that sits between comedy and drama, seeking intimacy but also a reading of our times.
Ignacio Bustos is in charge of production. He has spent several years producing commercials and publicly funded short films.
What your contributions will fund
The €8,000 we self-financed already covers the basic production of the film. What we raise here will go towards:
Gear: renting better camera and lighting equipment.
Art direction: a more considered production design.
Crew: better wages.
Post-production: professional-level colour grading, score and sound design.
Festivals: working with a distributor to take the film to festivals around the world.
Planned schedule
Mid-December 2026: shoot.
Weeks following the shoot: delivery of the exclusive behind-the-scenes content.
December 2026 – mid-February 2027: post-production.
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Lucia
Vamos :))