Ben Manzanera, a Los Angeles–based scriptwriter, earned recognition at DigiFicc with an award from Seriesland Lab for a transmedia project titled Personal Reduction (Layoffs). The honor was announced during the IX Bilbao Seriesland Festival, an international gathering where industry professionals and representatives from major companies such as Viacom, Paramount, and FLIXXO Platform came together. The Manzanera prize includes two days of development consulting for two selected candidates, one expert, and two personalized sessions with producers from around the globe, along with the heightened visibility that festivals provide to audiovisual creators.
Among the finalists for the face-to-face category were the screenwriter, director, and producer from Santa Pola, David Guillen, with participants also joining from Brazil and Argentina. In the online category, talents from Lebanon, Colombia, Uruguay, and Mexico were recognized alongside other nominees.
Personal Reduction is a dark business satire that examines the desperate measures a company takes to avoid severance payments or liquidation of its workforce. Instead of supporting and honoring staff, the narrative reveals how workers are discarded as if they were mere line items in a spreadsheet.
The project drew on real experiences from the private sector, reflecting on layoffs faced during professional careers and the way employees can feel reduced to numbers when companies reevaluate their teams. The creator describes the script as a blend of suspense and black humor, turning a painful topic into provocative fiction that resonates with audiences in several markets.
The work aims to critique the capitalist system through satire, delivering sharp commentary with a fearless tone. The award serves as a meaningful milestone in the creator’s trajectory, following the Solinas Award win at the Madrid Italian Film Festival in 2021. The project is advancing toward feature development under the umbrella of Reflection of Sirens, a collaboration with the Pedraforca International Center for Audiovisual Development. After debuting a first short film, HOMOpatriarchy, at the CCCC Film Laboratory in Valencia in September, the creator continues to pursue ambitious new productions and collaborations across Europe and the Americas.