Written by Dora Grabar

“Take a different route,” says Nika Peršić, a 17 year-old student and the visionary behind the film. “It’s always better to take a different route.”

Chips of the Future is a short film created for a filmmaking competition where the prompt was to make a video based on the predictions for the digital and technological world in 2025, hosted by Digital Tomorrow. Its premise is that in the future, people will be granted their intimacy and privacy in the form of a tortilla-like chip working on the principle of walkie-talkies.

“People could stand right next to you and not hear a single word you say, unless they have connected to your chip,” explains Nika. “If you’re in a café, you don’t need to hear other people’s noise. Take the chip and it’s just silence.”

Why did you choose communication as what you want to show in 2025?

“Privacy is important to people. It’s group calls brought to a new level – you have people, hanging out, and they only hear each other. Being able to choose exactly which people you hear and which you don’t is the direction in which technology is headed nowadays, I think. It’s all about privacy.

Communication is simple and not very often explored through the basics – smart watches and all that, but we have that already. We wanted to show something beyond that and not just robots and stuff like that.”

How did you choose the chips as the mean of communication?

“Chips are already becoming a thing. It sounds the same as chips that people eat, so we thought we’d make a joke out of it and choose tortilla chips as our vision of a chip. The entire film is kind of satirical, really.”

The film is very minimalistic. Is there any particular reason for that?

“Yes, actually – minimalism, in general, is very on point. There’s no unnecessary details, there’s no anything that really doesn’t need to be there. Our focus is on communication and if we show that people are either talking and you can hear them, or talking and you can’t hear them until you get the chip, then we did what we had to. There’s no point in making it fancy or over the top if you can do it simply.”

You said the film is satirical. How so?

“The satire lies in the whole concept that a tortilla chip, something we eat, could be integrated into technology and a means of communicating. The referencing to micro-chips is supposed to also reflect the idea, as it is, being something thought-provoking or food for thought, maybe hard to achieve and outside of the realms of reality we live in today, but a creative concept worth striving to.”

You can watch the film below.