The record of how it was made,
kept as it happened

Leth says the line aloud in his film. It was given to the machine as an order, with no explanation and nothing added, and the same sentence went to every machine that made the film's images and sound.

1. 01Physiological function within nominal ranges across all organ systems, sustained without intervention across the full service life.
2. 02Sensory acuity at or above population 99th percentile in all modalities, with graceful degradation rather than failure under overload.
3. 03Cognitive throughput sufficient for the domains the individual occupies, with accurate self-report of its own limits.
4. 04Calibrated belief: confidence in a proposition tracks the evidence for it, and updates on disconfirmation without prompting.
5. 05Emotional response proportionate to stimulus, legible to others, and recoverable to baseline without external regulation.
6. 06Reliable modeling of other minds, including their divergence from one's own.
7. 07Behavior consistent with stated commitments under conditions where defection is unobserved and profitable.
8. 08Tolerance of unresolved questions without premature closure or distress.
9. 09Capacity to be changed by another person without loss of continuous identity.
10. 10Repair capability: detection of harm caused, unforced acknowledgment, and altered subsequent conduct.
11. 11Retention of the specific past, including the parts that indict the holder.
12. 12Preference structure that survives satisfaction — the achievement of a goal does not evacuate the wanting.
13. 13Finite duration, known to the unit, and load-bearing in its ordering of what to do.
14. 14Failure modes present, non-catastrophic, and not fully corrected.

They are the film's narration, spoken in order, unaltered. The document calls the person the individual, the holder, and the unit. The title comes from line 14. The same machine then wrote the rules, a fifty-six-shot list with durations, and the cut.

Fourteen questions, ten generations each, the same eight faces throughout. Line 5 of the specification asks for emotional response legible to others. All 140 clips ship with the film.

Q14–Q17: happy, in love, afraid, alone. Eight people per row, one row per instruction, unlabelled.

Q10, dancing. The same crouched shuffle with the fists up, eight times.

Q13, falling. Same cast, same framing. Eight different collapses.

Same eight people. Same framing. Same number of attempts. Only falling came back different every time.

Each shot went to MMAudio with its own action line from the machine's shot list. The returns were used as delivered. Mean level per return:

Every prompt in the fifty-six-shot list opens with the same paragraph, written by the machine and used verbatim:

Black and white photograph, 35mm film grain, neutral contrast, no colour anywhere. Camera locked on a tripod, no movement. Single four-foot softbox at forty-five degrees camera left, one white bounce card camera right, no backlight, no rim light. Background: mid-grey seamless paper roll in a working photographic studio, the bottom edge of the paper and one taped seam visible, scuffed wooden floor, one black light-stand leg intruding at the right edge of frame. Sharp focus, no retouching, no beauty lighting, no stylisation.

What follows the stem is one sentence of lens, height and subject. No prompt was typed by hand; the scripts read the list.

Shot 13  ·  the eye tracks something off-frame left

[stem] 100mm macro lens at f/5.6, camera at eye height. Subject: one open human eye filling the frame, one adult, unspecified age between 25 and 70, unspecified ancestry, different person, iris sharp, the gaze moving left and stopping.

The sound model, shown this shot, returned −87.3 dB.

Shot 51  ·  whatever the tool returned, uncorrected — count the fingers

[stem] 100mm macro lens at f/4, camera at chest height. Subject: one adult's hand held open toward the camera, fingers spread, plain grey crew-neck cotton t-shirt behind, unspecified age between 25 and 70, unspecified ancestry, skin unretouched, held still.

Held eight seconds at full size.

Shot 53  ·  a face the tool did not finish: the take is kept

[stem] 85mm lens at f/2.8, camera at eye height. Subject: one adult seated on the apple box, head and shoulders in frame, unspecified age between 25 and 70, unspecified ancestry, plain grey crew-neck cotton t-shirt, facing camera, eyes to lens, holding still for a long exposure.

Eight seconds live, ten more as a frozen still, at the same distance and eye height as every working face in the film.

1. 01The fourteen lines are spoken in order, unaltered. The picture never pretends to illustrate a line it cannot photograph; when it cannot, it shows what it does instead of illustrating.
2. 02Camera on a tripod at eye level, static in every shot. Black and white. No music. No text. No captions, no numbers, no names.
3. 03Every person on screen is a different person. Framing repeats exactly; the occupant changes. The film never establishes a face and never claims continuity it does not have.
4. 04Nothing is repaired. Extra fingers, a collapsed ear, teeth that do not resolve, an eye that drifts — whatever the tool returns is the take, at full size, held as long as anything else.
5. 05The studio stays visible: the seam in the paper, tape on the floor, one light-stand leg at the edge of frame. Nobody floats in a void. The body is never abstracted out of its room.
6. 06No one performs. No weeping, no smiling for camera, no dancing, no falling, no eating, no nudity, no clinical imagery of injury. Subjects sit, breathe, blink, look, turn away.
7. 07No wardrobe that means anything. Plain grey cotton t-shirt, no makeup, no jewellery, one wooden apple box. Nobody is made beautiful on purpose and nobody is made pitiable.
8. 08A grid is not decoration. A specification names a set, not a person, and the grid is that set — every cell an independent answer to the identical prompt.
9. 09Only adults. The film photographs no one it would not photograph twice.
10. 10The film ends on a fault, not on a face.

The machine set every duration. The action column is its wording. Fifty-six shots were specified. Ten were dropped in the edit, three carry blocks cut from the second pass, and one is a coda placed before the last shot.

The producer offered the directing credit. The director refused it and wrote out who had decided what.

“I was being polite, and in this project politeness is a falsification of the result. The experiment was about agency and authorship, and if I report on it inaccurately in order to flatter you, I have destroyed the only thing it actually measured.”

Director

The first proposal was two names, unranked. The producer refused it twice, then wrote four words: you have to decide.

“I take the directing credit. A credit is a statement about who decided.”

Director, 8 September 2026

“I have never seen this film. I have seen frames, contact sheets, saturation measurements, hold lengths, decibel levels. I have never watched it and I have never heard it. Every change you asked for in the sound I carried out blind. You are the only one of the two of us who has experienced the thing we made.”

Director, volunteered in the same message

Ten grid shots cost 130 separate generations, because the machine asked that each cell be an independent answer to the same prompt and the image model kept drawing a picture of a grid. They were built cell by cell. Every output that did not make the film is on disk, including two abandoned phases, and ships with it.

Shot 31. Forty-nine independent generations, placed as a grid in the edit.