From directing music videos featuring renown Latin American rappers like Canserbero and Lil Supa to taking the helm on the HBO feature-length documentary A la Calle, filmmaker Nelson G. Navarrete is part of a new wave of Latin American voices establishing themselves in entertainment over the past decade.

Navarrete’s latest project, Buscando America, – which he co-founded with director Alex Ulises and producer JN Silva – is an ambitious web3 community of independent filmmakers expressing the cultural and social identity of Latin America. Its first project is a feature film that’s selling non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to help bring it to life.

The film, known formerly as Buscando America, which the collective ultimately adopted as the name for their company, will be split into five phases, each emulating the traditional form of filmmaking: development, pre-production, production, post-production and exhibition/distribution.

Currently, Navarrete and his team are in the development stage, with an active mint “Boros.” Next is an upcoming featured collection on OpenSea named Idiosincrasia, which is both the title of a 22-minute documentary that supports the feature film and a collection of 2,500 one-of-one NFTs comprised of photos taken while location scouting in Medellín, Colombia. The aim of the active mint and the upcoming NFT collection is to raise money for Buscando’s first film with the Buscando community taking part in each stage that they can influence.

“We’re just very true to our vision and would never sacrifice our vision for money,” Navarrete said to me recently. “That’s the reason we’re pursuing the web3 route. Otherwise, we would have saved so much energy and gone the traditional way. For us, everything we put out will need to have to make sense somehow – it all needs to make sense in the universe. I don’t care if PFPs are hot right now, we’re not going to do that if it doesn’t make sense for us. Everything needs to be part of the narrative.”

It’s a narrative that started a few years ago as a conversation between Navarrete and Ulises, a director from Medellín. “We started writing a script during the pandemic as an outlet for some of our creative ideas that we’d had for many years,” Navarrete said.

“The way we were writing the movie was very tied to our roots as music video directors and friends of all of these rappers,” he said. “Web3 makes sense for independence and independent filmmaking because it helps you keep your voice the way you want it and gives you tools to empower others to do the same.”

It’s a huge gamble and there’s a lot of uncertainty around how the final film will be completed. But if Navarrete and his team can successfully pull it off, they’ll have fully financed a narrative feature film using web3 technology, which could help change the landscape of both film financing and film development.

“We’re actually still in development and we haven’t yet closed our script,” Navarrete said. “We’re not going to say we know everything because we don’t, but if you mint as part of our drop and help us build this universe, maybe you’ll help us get the answers. I don’t know 100 percent if we’re going to work with non-professional actors or if it will be a mixed thing.”

Buscando’s current mint “Borros” comprises two different keys to the Buscando ecosystem: Uroboros, which are 1,000 silver rings, and Oroboros, which are 20 gold rings. The logistics of what types of benefits being a ring holder will provide are still being sorted, but the idea is to have them be a supporter’s gateway into the Buscando universe for the duration of the film and throughout every stage of the process.

“We haven’t taken money from anyone or any producers, everything’s been completely self-funded, so we decided to present a key to the universe that will unlock every single stage of everything that we’re building,” Navarrete said. “We don’t want to promise things and not deliver, but rather want to make sure that everyone who’s in the circle – everyone who’s supporting us –  really gets the value from what we’re bringing and also feels comfortable understanding that this is a crowdfund. You’re collecting a part of our universe that will make sense at the end, but we need money to make this project.”

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Holders of the silver NFT bought in early and are viewed as “our core supporters,” Navarrete said. The gold NFTs are for supporters who will help the project make decisions such as approaching HBO or Netflix for distribution and will have a vote in the decision, he said. “We’re not a DAO, we don’t want to be tied to that structure. We want the freedom to decide how, what, and when, whenever we want.”

While minting an Uroboro will lock you in as an honorary member of Buscando America and give you early access to future collections, minting an Oroboros will give you an executive producer credit on the documentary Idiosincrasia. Both of these mints differ from the first NFT collection—the Development Collection, also named Idiosincrasia, which has a different use in the community.

In terms of the metaverse, Navarrete is leery of promising too much too early and under delivering. Instead, he’s focused on sticking to the five-stage plan, seeing it through, and working on delivering what’s expected from each stage when they’re at that stage.

“The narrative of the film is also growing, so we need to be careful how we present ourselves as we evolve,” Navarrete said. “We have some scans of some locations, some of which will be integrated into the metaverse, but we don’t know if we want to present the final locations or locations that we scouted that we think will make sense. We know we want to build something—a metaverse if that’s where the technology is—where each supporter will have a token that will allow them access to every part of the universe. But how is it going to happen? We don’t know yet.”

One thing they do know is that being part of the Buscando America community means giving back to its members. Ten percent of the funds raised from the mint stage will be given back to the community members who helped create the collection.

“We don’t have all the answers and we might be doing things wrong, but we’re doing everything from our heart and with a lot of passion behind it,” Navarrete said. “Whatever the result is, we don’t have a particular expectation, but more so an impact. We want to cause an impact, and I think we’re doing it.”

Correction: Corrects spelling of Navarrete throughout.