‘I’m asking people to do a lot, but that’s what it means to be a human’: why one man made the first straight-to-VHS movie in 20 years

Roberto dos Santos is taking the hard route to releasing his first feature film, and is no fan of AI: ‘Someone once said that if your mum can do it, it doesn’t have value’

T he new film This Is How the World Ends is a fine piece of work; the story of two siblings finding each other at a party held at humanity’s end, it is basically On the Beach set at Burning Man. However, what is really remarkable about it is its method of release, as the first straight to VHS film in 20 years.

In the early 2000s it was estimated 90% of British households owned a VCR – the last halcyon days of the format, before it was replaced by DVDs, and then Blu-ray, then streaming. In 2016, the world’s last VCR manufacturer Funai Electric ceased production. To release a film straight to video, in other words, is to make watching your film as difficult as possible.

That, explains the film’s director Robert dos Santos, is kind of the point. “I love the idea that you need to be part of the club to watch this,” he says over video call from Cannes. “It’s for people that have a specific taste. There is a band of human beings who really understand what we’re doing.”

Originally a lawyer, the South African moved into film-making after he found himself held up at gunpoint multiple times over the space of a couple of months. “I realised that I’m going to die one day and, if I’m going to die, I might as well do something that I’ll really, truly, passionately enjoy.”

There are elements of this in the film itself. My assumption upon hearing about the VHS release strategy was that This Is How the World Ends would be a deliberately trashy genre piece that had fun with the limits of the format’s ability. Instead, it is a beautifully shot modern indie film that grapples with a lot of big themes. You don’t need to be a therapist to draw a straight line from Dos Santos’s real-life experiences to the movie’s end of the world hedonism. But it’s also worth noting that the thing that ends the world here is AI.

And the looming threat of automated creativity is what pushed Dos Santos towards the unconventional release. “It’s a film made by humans for humans,” he says. “I want people to feel something that’s imperfect, because VHS is not a perfect medium, but there’s also a physical process to it. You have to order a tape and, for some people, actually go out and buy a VCR.

“I’m asking people to do a lot, but that’s what it means to be a human. That’s what it means to exist in this lifetime, to actually participate in the act of life, and not to just allow things to happen. It’s to go out there, and feel the bumps and the grooves of life.”