On November 18, 2115, in the cellars of the Louis XIII cognac house in the city of Cognac, a Fichet-Bauche safe will open, and about a thousand descendants of people who received metal invitations in 2015 will see the short film "100 Years" starring John Malkovich. Director Robert Rodriguez made a work whose premiere neither he himself, nor his children, nor probably his grandchildren will live to see.
The Louis XIII Cognac brand produces spirits using a technology stretched across a century. Grapes from the 2015 harvest will become cognac ready for bottling only by 2115. Four generations of cellar masters pass Limousin oak barrels to one another, inside which slow chemical reactions of esterification and oxidation proceed. Each company master winemaker works for a future he himself will never see—his blending decisions will be evaluated by his successor's successor.
In 2015, the house's marketers decided not simply to tell this story, but to materialize it in the form of an impossible project. The advertising campaign became a literal time capsule. Rodriguez was tasked with shooting a film the public wouldn't see in his lifetime—exactly as a winemaker pours spirit into a barrel he'll never taste himself.
The director agreed. Malkovich wrote the screenplay and played the lead role alongside Shuya Chang and Marko Zaror. The crew worked their shifts, editors assembled the final version. Then the master copy was placed in a custom-made bulletproof safe by the French company Fichet-Bauche, the timer was programmed for November 18, 2115, and the construction was sent to storage. No film crew in history has worked with such a release deadline.
In November 2015, the brand held a series of closed screenings—not of the film itself, but of its idea. Guests were shown three short teasers, each offering its own version of 2115: retro-futuristic in the spirit of 1940s–50s science fiction, ecological with nature intertwined with ruins, technocratic with holograms and flying objects. None of the teasers revealed the full version's plot—they weren't fragments but parallel worlds.
Each of the 1,000 guests received a flat metal ticket the size of a business card. The premiere date and brief instructions are engraved on it: pass it to descendants. This isn't a symbolic gesture—the tickets are made from an alloy designed for a century of storage without corrosion. The invitation fits in a jacket pocket, but its purpose is to outlive its owner.
The project's logic required creating not just an advertising clip, but an object that exists physically yet remains inaccessible to verification. The safe stands somewhere in a guarded facility, its timer counting down seconds, but no one can open the lock early without destroying the mechanism. The brand promised that in 2115 there would be a public premiere, but legally this promise has no backing—the company could change ownership, copyright policy will change, the medium itself could become technologically obsolete. The film exists as Schrödinger's cat: simultaneously ready and inaccessible, created and unwatched.
The ontological status of "100 Years" is unclear. The classic definition of cinema includes the act of projection before an audience—a film acquires meaning at the moment of viewing. Rodriguez created a work denied this act for a century ahead. Can it be considered a film now, or is it simply magnetic tape (or a digital file) with a set of frames that will become a film only on November 18, 2115?
Film historian Tom Gunning described early cinema as an "attraction," where the effect of demonstration matters more than narrative. The Louis XIII project returns cinema to its roots: viewers in 2015 saw not a film but a performance of its absence. The teasers worked like museum labels next to an empty frame. The metal tickets became artifacts whose value lies in the promise of future access, not in current function.
Malkovich in interviews called the project a bridge between generations but didn't specify what exactly it would manage to transmit. If the premiere happens, viewers in 2115 will see the film through the lens of a century of cultural changes—jokes will be dated, the visual language will seem archaic, the actors will have been dead a hundred years, and the costume fashions will have turned into museum antiquities. The film risks becoming not a work of art but a historical document about how people in 2015 imagined the future. This is exactly the same transformation that 1960s science fiction films undergo, shot before the internet and mobile phones existed.
Brands are used to buying audience attention, but Louis XIII bought the absence of attention. Classic advertising works on immediate response—showing a product triggers the desire to buy. The "100 Years" project creates a paradox: the longer you remember it, the less chance you have of seeing the result. This is anti-advertising in pure form: an investment in an event whose effect will manifest when all the managers who made the decision are dead.
Anthropologist David Graeber described rituals as actions whose value lies in the performance itself, not in practical results. Locking the film in a safe became a corporate ritual of patience. The brand demonstrates it's ready to invest in projects with a century payback period—exactly as a winemaker lays down barrels his great-great-grandchildren will open. This is a message not for the buyer of a bottle of cognac in 2015, but for an abstract "eternal customer" who believes in the sustainability of tradition.
But ritual only works if people believe in it. The Fichet-Bauche safe could break, the manufacturer could go bankrupt, the film medium could degrade. The promise of the 2115 premiere is an act of faith comparable to religious faith: no one can verify its fulfillment now, but the very fact of the promise's existence changes people's behavior in the present. Owners of metal tickets pass them to their children not because they're certain of the premiere, but because they're participating in a collective fantasy of continuity.
The "Retro," "Nature," and "Future" teasers aren't a random set of visual styles. Each represents a separate cultural anxiety of the 2010s. "Retro" references the futurism of the 1940s–50s: how science fiction of that era imagined the future—with flying cars and faith in boundless technical progress. This is a future that didn't come true.
"Nature" shows a planet where civilization has retreated and forests have grown through concrete. The post-apocalyptic aesthetic popular in 2010s games and films works as a Rorschach test: some see in it an ecological utopia of return to nature, others—the collapse of industrial society. This teaser offers no answer, only an atmosphere of uncertainty.
"Future" presents a technocratic picture with holograms and seamless integration of human and machine. But instead of Silicon Valley optimism—cold minimalism, where technology doesn't liberate but erases boundaries between control and comfort. This is the future of 2115 as panopticon: everything transparent, nothing hidden, privacy dead.
None of the three variants promises progress. All of them are versions of anxiety. The brand isn't selling optimism, it's fixing the bewilderment of 2015 before the uncertainty of climate change, the technological generation gap, and the exhaustion of grand narratives. The teasers work not as forecast but as a mirror of an era that has lost the ability to dream of a future without catastrophe.
If tomorrow it's revealed that the safe is empty and the film never existed—would anything change? The Louis XIII project has already fulfilled its function: it made people talk about the brand, created media buzz, spawned discussions about the nature of cinema and time. The full version of "100 Years" could turn out to be an ordinary short subject, edited in a few days—but that won't cancel the cultural effect the project has already produced.
Art theorist Boris Groys called contemporary art "documentation of its own absence." The viewer sees not the work but the trace of its creation: an installation that fixes the process, a performance recorded on video, a concept existing only in a manifesto. "100 Years" takes this logic to its limit: the film is present through its complete absence. The teasers, tickets, safe, press releases—all this is not the film, but a system of signs pointing to it. The real work is hidden, but its cultural function unfolds right now, in conversations, articles, speculation about content.
Rodriguez and Malkovich agreed to work on a project whose evaluation they won't hear. Critics won't write reviews, viewers won't leave feedback, box office receipts are impossible. This is pure creativity without feedback—a situation unimaginable for commercial cinema, where every decision is verified by test screenings and focus groups. Perhaps this very freedom from immediate reaction made the project attractive to the director: to shoot a film you don't need to justify to producers because no one will know the result in your lifetime. But this same freedom turns the work into a phantom—it could be brilliant, a failure, or not exist at all, and until 2115 all three versions are equally true.