Hyper Hacktive Festival

The coop had a film crew and an engineering studio, and no room where the two met.

The two crews shared a company and not much else — different clients, different weeks, different rooms. Directors and technicians who might have worked together had no occasion to meet, and the software the studio builds for open-source ecosystems stayed invisible to the people whose films it could carry. Hyper Hacktive answers a question nobody had formally asked: what happens if you put them in one cinema for an evening.

The coop produces events. It does not only film them.

Samouraï Coop has been building and promoting open-source culture since 2016, and it produces its own festival rather than renting its crew to someone else’s. That position has a practical edge: Samouraï Grants funds independent documentary filmmakers, and the festival is where that funded work is shown. Two crews, one company — the festival is where the sentence stops being a slogan and becomes an evening with a door and a projector.

Prove it in a small room before booking a large one.

The first edition was deliberately modest: one evening, 20h–21h30, at Le Brady on boulevard de Strasbourg, on 4 October 2024. Ninety minutes is not a festival — it is a test of whether the audience exists and whether two crews who rarely share a week can run a room together. Both answers came back yes, and the two editions that followed took mk2 Quai de Seine, on 3 July 2025 and 2 July 2026.

The festival runs on ticketing we build ourselves.

Zenao is Samouraï Coop’s event software — ticketing, check-in and community coordination — and Hyper Hacktive runs on it. Point a browser at hyperhacktive.io and it resolves to the festival’s Zenao event page: the festival’s own domain is a Zenao URL, which is a harder claim to make than saying we use our own tools. The film crew produced, programmed and shot the evening; engineers carried frontend, backend, reliability and QA, on the night as much as before it. Zenao’s code is public, and the parts a ticketed event leans on hardest — issuing tickets, checking them at the door, exporting participants, taking payment — are the parts we test on our own audience before anyone else’s.

• Source:zenao.io ↗
• Source:github.com/samouraiworld/zenao ↗

A full programme, in a single evening, on our own ticketing.

The 2 July 2026 edition filled mk2 Quai de Seine: 10 films screened across one evening, every ticket issued and checked through Zenao. Work the crew produced has been on that screen — I’m Just a Lost Guy and Soy Yo among it — alongside the projects the engineering studio builds for Protocol Labs, gno.land, Onbloc, Berty and Teritori. A festival programme and a client list are not usually the same document. Here they overlap, deliberately.

The room was full. What it was for is the harder thing to count.

The evening did what it was built to do, and the part that mattered is not the number at the door: directors met technicians, and both met the people who write the software. That is the outcome the festival exists for, and it is the one we cannot yet put a figure on. We are not going to invent one.

• A named quote from the night — awaiting