Cinema’s return to radical presence
Dogma lives on!

Somewhere between dopamine loops and content-as-currency, a small group of filmmakers are asking: what if we made cinema harder to produce, but easier to feel? 
What if we turned inward, tapped into our own unruly minds, our unpolished nature and simply made films, for the truth that doesn’t trend?
This is the spirit of Dogma 25, a newly ignited movement of radical filmmaking that draws its first breath from the embers of another rebellion, Dogme 95, the Danish cinematic manifesto that stripped film of its polish in the 1990s and dared it to be human again.

Dogme 95, launched in 1995 by Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg, Kristian Levring, and Søren Kragh-Jacobsen, wasn’t just counter-Hollywood - it was a full-body exorcism of cinematic vanity. Their “Vow of Chastity” demanded no artificial lighting, no props brought to set, no added sound, no genre, and above all, no bullshit. It was cinema without its make-up.

The Celebration (Festen, Vinterberg) was one of the first films launched as part of this cinematic movement. Shot on handheld digital video, the film turned a family reunion into a moral gut-punch. Von Trier’s The Idiots (Idioterne) followed, even more volatile: it centred on a group of adults who perform intellectual disability in public spaces as a form of anti-bourgeois protest. Nominated for the Palme d’Or in 1998, the film was condemned and canonized in equal measure.
Irony was baked in from the beginning though. The Idiots - Dogme #2 - was already cheating. A stand-in actor. Manipulated lighting. And von Trier later confessed it. The “Vow of Chastity” cracked not with inevitability, the movement already breaking the commandments it had carved in stone after just two films in. But maybe that was the point.
Dogme 95 was never about obedience. It was about creating friction.
Not rules, but resistance. A refusal to anaesthetize.

Dogme 95 was contagious. It leaked into the bones of mumblecore, drifted through the realism of the Dardenne brothers, mutated in the hands of Harmony Korine, and lingers now in docu-hybrids, lo-fi experiments and first-person poetics. Its ghost still flickers in films where the image doesn’t shout, where the frame does not move at unstoppable speeds, and where imperfection is sacred.
And yet, of course, it became a brand. The dogma that said the director must not be credited gave us Vinterberg and von Trier on every panel, every headline. A rebellion swallowed by its mythology.
Eventually, the vows collapsed under their purity. As a director, you couldn’t follow all ten and still make a film, not really. The movement unraveled. But what it left behind was a kind of cinematic muscle memory; a blueprint for breaking the Hollywoodian form of filmmaking.
Call it what you want: manifesto, mischief, myth. It changed the temperature of the room.
But it’s 2025 now, and the devil wears code.

The Dogma 25 movement, introduced this year at Cannes Film Festival, arrives not to remake the same argument, but to expand it. Echoing its forebearer but responding to the pressures of algorithm-driven content, AI-generated visuals and creative alienation. The movement is led by a new vanguard of filmmakers: May el-Toukhy, Annika Berg, Isabella Eklöf, Milad Alami, and Jesper Just. Their question is simple but subversive:
What happens when you make a film with no tabs open?
Where Dogme 95 fought cinematic artifice, Dogma 25 enters a battlefield where the enemy is invisible and embedded.
Reality as clickbait.
Vision flattened into engagement.
Meaning engineered for virality.
A world of images optimized into oblivion.
This isn’t a nostalgia trip to DV tape and Verfremdungseffekt. It’s something far more urgent: a confrontation with the ontology of the image in an age of endless reproduction
This is Dogma 25, a deliberate pause in a world built to autoplay.

Dogma 25’s ten Vows of Chastity
Dogma 25’s vows do not chase purity for purity’s sake, they seek to reclaim responsibility. Only one vow survives from Dogme 95: film where your story is set. The rest? They read like a protest poem against the machinery of modern image-making:
1. The script must be original and handwritten by the director
2. At least half the film must be without dialogue
3. The internet is off limits in all creative processes
4. We’ll only accept funding with no content altering conditions
5. No more than ten people behind the camera
6. The film must be shot where the narrative takes place
7. No makeup or manipulation of faces and bodies unless it's narrative-driven
8. Everything used must be rented, borrowed, found, or used
9. The film must be made in no more than one year
10. Create the film as if it were your last

We could call these the spiritual parameters of resistance. Not rules for aesthetic purity, but boundaries that provoke responsibility; a way of interrupting the seamlessness that makes modern media so easy to consume and so easy to forget.
What are we really saying with our images?
Who is being seen and who is being erased?
Is the message shaping us or the medium?

Where Dogme 95 challenged cinema’s excesses - tracking shots, overdubbing, fake lighting - Dogma 25 targets the much subtler, more insidious structures that shape images today. The tyranny of relevance. The aesthetic of speed. The emotional flattening that occurs when every image competes for your next scroll.

The slow cinema of now
Five films a year. That’s the movement’s promise. No big launches, no branded universes, no merch. Just stories that ask you to listen longer than you’d like. That welcome silence. That reminds you that presence is something you build, not something that happens by accident.
Can a film be a form of resistance?
Can a camera be used like a pen, a prayer, a protest?
Can cinema still surprise us by doing less?
Dogma 25 believes it can. And in a world that’s racing toward faster, brighter, smoother, maybe the most radical thing you can do is hold a shot, hold a thought, hold a truth a little longer.

Dogma 95’s raw, rebellious spirit upended the cinematic status quo, but its true legacy lies beyond its manifesto - it lives in the voices it amplified and the creative spaces it carved out. To understand Dogma 25 today, we must recognize how this lineage has been shaped and expanded, especially by filmmakers who have historically been marginalized in traditional film systems.

Lone Scherfig’s Italian for Beginners (2000) was an early beacon within Dogme 95, introducing a gentler, more tender voice that challenged the movement’s stereotype of raw intensity. With humour and warmth, Scherfig proved minimalist filmmaking could deepen emotional connection rather than diminish it.
Alongside her, Susanne Bier’s Open Hearts (2002) stripped back cinematic artifice to expose raw human pain and resilience. Her intimate storytelling turned the spotlight on trauma and relationships with a clarity that felt urgent yet timeless, showing how Dogme’s austerity could amplify, not erase, complexity.
Even before Dogme’s manifesto existed, Chantal Akerman was charting a radical course of stillness and repetition. Her seminal Jeanne Dielman (1975) transformed the everyday, domestic routine into a political act of resistance, demonstrating that silence and monotony could carry a cinematic power that defied narrative convention.

And what about Agnes Varda, whose blend of fiction and documentary, playfulness and politics, feels almost prophetic now? In The Gleaners and I (2000), she crafted a manifesto-in-motion: modest in means, generous in gaze, and radically personal.

Building on this foundation, the vanguard of Dogma 25 today, filmmakers like May el-Toukhy, Annika Berg, and Isabella Eklöf, not only inherit but expand this tradition, facing down the unique pressures of the digital age. El-Toukhy makes emotional risk essential again, refusing art that is safe or sanitized. Berg’s work maps internet addiction as a political and creative crisis, spotlighting how digital life fractures presence and creativity. And Eklöf, through films like Holiday and Kalak, confronts us with moral ambiguity so raw it unsettles, refusing to let us look away or seek easy answers.

These filmmakers are theorists as much as artists. They wield slowness, discomfort, and intimacy as political tools, insisting cinema can - and must - resist the accelerating, homogenizing forces of algorithmic culture.

World widely rushing between synthetic images and instant consumption, Dogma 25 offers a deliberate alternative; a practice of presence, a reminder that meaningful cinema doesn’t have to compete for perfect moments.
A space in which the sacred isn’t loud, and art isn’t a commodity, it’s an act of bearing witness.
I keep coming back to one thought: these films may not be designed for our rewired brains, adapted to an endless drive, constant inner absence and the amputation of self. This is why I look forward to seeing them: to show up, to stay with the image, to be present with the act of seeing simply for the pure love of unfiltered cinema.
Dogma 25 may not shout rebellion, but in its quiet persistence it challenges a culture dominated by speed, spectacle and algorithmic control. Ultimately, it invites us back to the tradition of filmmaking and storytelling, a return to authenticity, attention and care in a world that desperately needs both.

Sources:

www.studiobinder.com/blog/dogme-95-rules-manifesto-films
www.dogma25.dk
www.nordiskfilm.com/news/dogma-25-charts-new-course-danish-film