Manetta

Inspiration

The project draws from the traditional Corsican song Manetta, which evokes friendship, hardship, and the strange distance created by wealth. The film expands these themes into a sci-fi odyssey, inspired by space-western aesthetics, Star Wars, The Expanse, and retrofuturist adventure tales. The goal was to preserve the emotional core of the chant while amplifying it into a story of exile, ambition, danger, and memory.

What it does

The film transforms the folk narrative into a space-opera biography told through music and imagery. Through a fluid back-and-forth between present and past, it follows Manetta’s journey: from his harsh childhood on the steppes, to survival in chaotic mining stations, to his rise as a pirate of the void and eventual galactic tycoon. The visuals explore wealth, loneliness, and nostalgia as the aging Manetta revisits the fragile steps that shaped him.

How we built it

The imagery was generated with Dreamina AI, Hailuo ai and Kling ai for musician performance, combining: post-frontier landscapes inspired by Central Asian steppes industrial sci-fi textures from asteroid belts and mining rings neon megacities and high-glass palaces a touch of playful space-opera iconography The montage was aligned directly to the neo-classical reorchestration: each memory sequence, each shift between eras, was built around the musical phrasing rather than dialogue.

Challenges we ran into

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we learned

What's next for Manetta

Built With

• dreamina
• grok
• hailuo
• kling