Written by Al Kalyk, image Saul Steinberg, 1948

It began, as many worthwhile things begin, with a failure. Valentine's Day, Los Angeles, the two of us on the couch, my partner Jacinta and I, scrolling through the same vast and indifferent catalogue we had scrolled through many times before. Thirty minutes passed in the blue glow of films pushed on us by the big streamers and studios. We skimmed without conviction, thumbnails designed by committee to steal attention but say nothing. We did not choose a film. We chose instead to go read, which is not a defeat exactly, but felt like one, because we had both wanted to watch something together. The apparatus that was supposed to make experiencing movies easier, had made it impossible. The algorithm had done what algorithms do: it had offered us everything and curated nothing.

That night I thought of the idea for Nous.

I am a filmmaker in Los Angeles. I recently made my first feature. It seems, from my perspective, our industry is broken. Not because there aren’t fantastic films and filmmakers, but I feel, because those who distribute our films no longer trust the audience, they take it upon themselves to trick the audience into attention. This is what happens when you reduce humans to numbers. I don’t like being fooled, my time on earth is precious to me.

Nous Cinema is the thing I built in response. A collaborative film discovery app where you and your friends pick your streaming services, choose a viewer profile, and swipe through curated films together. When your group all says yes to the same movie, it is a match. You vote on your matches and you get your evening's programme. It is free, it works in forty countries, it runs across more than a hundred streaming services. It took months to build. It is, at its core, an attempt to restore the power of choosing to the viewer and sort through the slop.

We launched the app in early March on the appstore, and google play soon after. Two hundred and ten users across twelve countries and eight languages. This month, the ten most chosen films on Nous were Zodiac, The Green Knight, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Memories of Murder, Blue Moon, Parasite, Sinners, Ratcatcher, The 'Burbs, and The Secret Agent. That list, I think, says something. It is not the list an algorithm would generate. It is the list a group of human beings with taste and range and the willingness to be surprised would arrive at together, Fincher beside Ramsay beside Spielberg beside Bong Joon-Ho. Studio spectacle beside Scottish realism beside Korean procedural, the uncanny confidence of people choosing for each other rather than being chosen for. And the ‘Burbs!

My partner and I, since launching the app, have started a deep dive of Iranian cinema of the 70s and 80s. We have watched Cool Runnings, Drop Dead Gorgeous, Boogie Nights, In the Mood for Love, Mastermind, and Manhattan. Movies we would never have chosen if not for the app, and movies that surprised, and delighted, even if they were films I’d seen before.

I want to talk about the decisions that do not appear in the app, the ones no user will ever see, things that I have learned in the process of writing my first app, learning code, largely through AI tools. This was not a single shot vibe code, this was a month of thinking through, designing, and learning.

When you write code you are making ethical choices constantly. Every swipe a user makes is a data point. You can track it. You can store it. You can track where the user is when they open the app. You can use that to find out where they live or work. You can create customer profiles, gradually, to narrow their world to the dimensions of their existing taste. This is what the industry does. This is what the industry rewards.

We chose not to do this.

Nous does not track your swiping behaviour. There is no recommendation algorithm built on your data. The profiles that curate your film pool are built on quality, on the accumulated knowledge of people who have spent their lives watching and thinking about film, not on the accumulated telemetry of your habits. The curation is human. The architecture is deliberately, almost stubbornly, dumb about you as an individual. I think it knows good movies, It does not know, and does not care to know, what you watched last Tuesday or where you watched it. We do not collect and sell user data.

There is a version of Nous that would be more profitable. I imagine most apps are being built like this. It’s scary to see behind the curtain, to know what this version looks like, to understand it is the default template. It is what every startup accelerator and every growth advisor and every monetization consultant would tell you to build. There are sharks in the ocean we are trying to swim in.

At every turn, we chose the other thing. The ethos of Nous is anti-algorithm and pro-community, and this is not a marketing position, it is a building philosophy, baked into the project at every level.

We are three filmmakers in Los Angeles. We have no investors, no advisory board, no venture capital. I built this with my own money during a period when the industry was contracting and work was scarce and the temptation to build something cynical and optimized is considerable. The goal was never to build a unicorn. The goal was to build a tool that pays for its server costs and is positioned, over time, to support our art-making and the art-making of others. A modest ambition.

Which brings me to the Nous-Letter.

In 1951, a group of young cinephiles in Paris, most of them not yet filmmakers, founded a journal called Cahiers du Cinéma. What they understood, and what the culture around them had not yet grasped, was that criticism and creation were not opposing activities but continuous ones, that the people who thought most carefully about films were often the people best equipped to make them, and that a publication could be a workshop, a provocation, a community, and an engine of taste all at once.

We are not comparing ourselves to Cahiers, and it’s not our goal to become a new letterbox. We are, however, saying that the impulse is the same.

Letterboxd has produced something remarkable and largely unacknowledged: a generation of viewers who think critically about film, who rate and review and catalogue and argue with a seriousness that the professional critical establishment has not always matched. These are people with taste and ideas and no platform that treats those ideas as worthy of more than a three-hundred-character review box. The Nous-Letter is an attempt to build that platform. Not a magazine, not a blog, not a Substack. A zine, quarterly, published digitally through the app and in print, rooted in cinema but open to art, to politics, to philosophy, to whatever someone has been thinking about with enough intensity that it deserves more than a caption.

We want the piece you would write for a friend, not for an editor. We want essays, reviews, interviews with people you admire, photographs from set, drawings, dispatches from the film scene in your city. Three hundred to seven hundred words, though we will not turn away something longer if it earns the length. You do not need to be a writer. You do not need a byline. You need to have paid attention to something and have a thought about it that is yours.

This is what we are building. An app that respects its users, and helps them fall in love with cinema again. Great art is out there and being made everyday, it’s just not getting enough eyeballs. The industry thinks it can force what it wants on the viewer and we will take it. We won’t.

A zine that believes everyone has something worth saying. A community of people who love film and love the conversation around film, and art, and philosophy, and everyday human experiences.

Two hundred and ten people in twelve countries have found their way to this in the first month. I don’t know how much demand there is for something like this, but in hope that others think the way that I do, welcome to Nous.

With love, Al