Dogma 25 – Vow of Chastity (2025) | Hacker News Reader

Dogma 25 – Vow of Chastity (2025)

dogma25.dk

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Interesting that they only have one rule in common with the predecessor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogme_95

And no signatures in common.

Also: how many films are still produced in line with Dogma 95?

35 in total as of last year, with the most recent released in 2004

https://web.archive.org/web/20250215082603/http://www.dogme9...

That said, I'm not sure if new certifications are still being accepted. So there may have been uncertified Dogme95-compliant films made since that was never been in the official list.

I feel like people are reading this as "this is how the under signers think all movies should be made, and we are judging movies not made this way as a moral failing", when I think a better reading would be "as directors/film makers/story tellers, this is how we think we can maximize our own creativity and joy when we make movies".

So this is my art degree coming out, but I feel like invoking the name of Dogma 95 and the "vow of chastity" without what appears to be any of the original people involved or blessing feels a little lame, especially when the actual rules are pretty different from the original. At least, I don't see any indication of like a real personal connection to the original.

I feel like they probably should have come up with a different name and just noted the connection in the manifesto

>The film must be shot where the narrative takes place.

This one really stands out by exculding whole genres and not really adding anything interesting to work around.

It kind of protects against low budget sci-fi I guess, which could be a net good thing.

Under the rules you could attempt to shoot Resident Alien, but not Star Trek.

I'm thinking you could shoot an awesome sci-fi thriller under these rules. Even one that includes space travel. Just don't have any of the narrative take place in space: have only one character off-planet and have them communicate via radio.

I've seen good, low-budget indie sci-fi short films that would presumably meet all of the Dogma 25 rules. So I think it doesn't protect against this category of films and neither would that be a good thing anyways. It just requires creative solutions if you want to e.g. portrait space travel.

Which genres would that be?

One could also argue that certain genres simply won't ever work as an arthouse movie.

> Which genres would that be?

Space opera, high fantasy and bangsian fantasy are three that come to mind.

I could see bangsian fantasy work if the afterlife were to be located on earth (which opens up some narrative possibilities, though they're a bit unoriginal). The other two are predicated upon portraying their locations inauthentically, which conflicts with the rules Dogme 25 strives to follow.

Exluding them is for the better... we got more than enough

I don't think it's meant as a constraint to be worked around, but as a guardrail against being inauthentic.

And it excludes a lot less than its inspiration Dogme 95, which has as one rule "Genre movies are not acceptable."

> "Genre movies are not acceptable."

I find that hilarious, like proclaiming that only other people have an ethnicity or an accent. Because of course Dogme is a genre of its own.

Dogme is more of a methodology than genre. Genre usually means settings and tropes, like scifi or horror or superhero.

Though I’d argue that rom-com, period pieces, and biopics also are “genre”, at least to the extent a particular movie just paints by numbers within those styles.

Perhaps Dogme 95/Dogma 25 films are in a genre of their own, but they're not "genre movies." People make the same argument with "literary fiction"/"non-genre fiction" vs "genre fiction." The terms have meaning whether or not you want to acknowledge it.

Makes sense because it's similar to one of the ones from Dogme95 which explicitly excluded genre files.

That's ok. The goal is not for every film to fit into this criteria.

I wonder if they would accept a CGI movie entirely set within a computer, nothing in the rules seem to prohibit it :).

What is happening? What is the difference between Dogma and Dogme? What is this site about?

"dogme" is the Danish, Norwegian, and French spelling of the word "dogma"

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dogme

Oooh. That explains my friend named Mathilde. Nice. Thanks.

Dogme is Danish, because it's a manifesto of a founded in Denmark - and it's basically an update of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogme_95

I maybe shouldn't judge their ideas about film by their choice of illegible background and text colors, but I do.

My eyes are bleeding reading this CSS

My brain is bleeding after reading this strange ass manifesto.

I believe red and black theme is an artistic choice. Sadly, readability suffers from this choice. Just making the text bold makes it a lot better while preserving its spirit.

The same way that HN puts tags like [video] or [pdf] in titles, they should have something like [eyestab] for a site like that. I was so not ready for that visual assault.

Pretentious, pompous trash.

Nothing like rules for spurring creativity. Waiting for the manual next.

Deliberately imposing constraints on yourself is actually a very well-established way to spur creativity and innovation. For example this movement was inspired by something similar from back in the 1990s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogme_95

> Nothing like rules for spurring creativity.

I feel like it's pretty well known in creative spaces that constraints breed creativity.

Creative after creative and artist after artist has said pretty much that constraints and limitations indeed spur creatitivy...

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