DAMA, the Spanish organisation responsible for managing audiovisual authors' rights, has unveiled the RECREAS Manifesto, launching the first collaborative professional network of Spanish-language series screenwriters. The initiative aims to unite the voices of Spanish-language audiovisual creators, foster knowledge-sharing, defend labour and copyright rights and raise awareness of the challenges facing the profession at a time of profound transformation.

The network celebrates the current success of Spanish-language series (such as Money Heist and The Eternaut) and highlights the work of their creators. It aims to become an open forum for support, collaboration and community. Among its objectives is to act as a bridge between screenwriters across Latin America, promoting cooperation through talks, meetings, studies, a professional directory and other initiatives designed to strengthen ties between countries.

The RECREAS Manifesto (read here, available in Spanish), the project's first milestone, was developed through a participatory and collaborative process. The document examines not only the creation of series, but also their circulation and reception in a highly competitive and culturally diverse global market. It identifies key challenges such as the recognition of authorship, the need for fair and equitable remuneration, and protection against production models that tend to sideline the author in favour of streamlining the value chain.

The text also stresses that the international boom in Spanish-language fiction coexists with significant challenges, including growing competition, inequalities within the profession and the risks of cultural homogenisation. In this context, it underscores the importance of nurturing artisanal production and defending screenwriting as the creative core of the process, preserving authorship as the foundation for building new imaginaries and strengthening Ibero-American cultural identity.

Among the key points of its advocacy are: the recognition and cultural value of screenwriters’ work; decent and fair working conditions; genuine gender equality; the demand for a shared ethical and legal framework inspired by European regulations to ensure that Artificial Intelligence does not dilute authorship, degrade the quality of works or violate authors’ rights — defending a protected space for human imagination; and diversity as both a strength and an identity, the greatest symbolic capital of the profession and a creative engine that must be recognised as a competitive advantage.

RECREAS is also a network for dialogue, recognition and the exchange of ideas among screenwriters of Ibero-American series. The project is promoted by DAMA and supported by an editorial and advisory committee made up of professionals from screenwriting, academia and cultural journalism. The Manifesto has been agreed upon by a network of professionals from Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Spain, the United States, Mexico and Uruguay, reflecting the diversity of perspectives that underpin the initiative.

Its calls for action include: promoting an Ibero-American Charter of Screenwriters' Rights; strengthening professional, creative and technological training in response to new challenges; facilitating the transfer of knowledge between veteran and emerging professionals; encouraging the creation of an Ibero-American Federation of Screenwriters' Associations; fostering co-productions, transnational collaborations and creative teams of different nationalities; and recognising the symbolic capital of Spanish-language series as a strategic asset within the cultural diplomacy strategies of Ibero-American governments.