What is Rubedo?

Rubedo is an interdisciplinary production house building infrastructure for cross-border creative collaboration in cinema, independent research, and digital media.

The database is where we start — as the intellectual foundation of a new model for international creative production that uses gold as its internal unit of account. We are interested in working with producers, researchers, historians, institutions, and anyone whose existing work intersects with this framework in interesting ways.

The name comes from the fourth and final stage of the alchemical process — the reddening, the moment when base materials are finally understood for what they are.

Why Contribute?

Every entry in this database stores four numerical data points: a geographic coordinate, a date, a gold weight in grams, and a payment medium classification. Payment medium runs on a five-tier scale — raw weighted gold, gold-denominated metal equivalent, minted gold coins, gold-denominated paper, fiat gold equivalent — reflecting how directly the transaction connected to physical gold at the moment it occurred.

Date, location, weight, and payment medium. Stored as numbers from day one.

We're collecting measurements that have never existed in one place before and building the data structure to accommodate analysis that compounds with every entry added. If you contribute, you're participating in the first systematic attempt to quantify something humans have always known but never measured. The value of creative work across all of human history. That's analytical axiology. And it starts with your entry.

Why Gold?

Roy Jastram's 1977 study The Golden Constant documented something remarkable: gold's purchasing power has remained broadly stable across four centuries of monetary history. While every currency inflated, devalued, and occasionally collapsed, gold held its real value with unusual consistency.

This database applies that insight to a specific question: what has creative labour actually cost, measured in gold, across human history and geography?

Au — Element 79. Resistant to oxidation and corrosion. Impossible to synthesize. Rare enough that you cannot simply make more of it when the numbers become inconvenient. These physical properties are what made gold the unit of account or store of value our ancestors independently selected across civilizations that had no contact with each other. The Aztecs and the Egyptians and the Chinese and the Romans ran the experiment separately and kept arriving at the same answer.

The monetary properties — scarcity, durability, divisibility, portability, fungibility — fall out of the physical properties almost automatically. It became money because it is the element the periodic table produced that best satisfies the requirements any monetary system needs to function across time and space.

Gold weight and purity calculator →

Co-production Treaty Network

Canada has formal audiovisual co-production treaties with fifty-seven countries. These agreements grant national artistic heritage status in both jurisdictions simultaneously, unlock stacked tax incentives that can cover the bulk of a production budget, and provide the legal architecture for genuine creative collaboration across borders.

They are among the most underutilized instruments in international creative finance. The reason is arithmetic — optimizing labour splits across multiple territories with fluctuating exchange rates is cognitively intractable when your unit of account keeps changing. Gold-denomination solves that problem. A gram of gold spent in wildly different locations is directly comparable in a way that domestic currencies never will be.

Rubedo is building the first international film production infrastructure that uses gold as its internal unit of account and Canada's treaty network as its coordination mechanism. The historical database establishes the baseline. Each production generates real-time data. The system gets smarter with every film made.

If you are a creator, researcher, or investor in any of the treaty territories and want to understand what this means in practice, we're interested in talking.

Algeria — Argentina — Australia — Austria — Belgium — Bosnia and Herzegovina — Brazil — Bulgaria — Chile — China — Colombia — Croatia — Cuba — Czech Republic — Denmark — Estonia — Finland — France — Germany — Greece — Hong Kong — Hungary — Iceland — India — Ireland — Israel — Italy — Japan — Jordan — Korea — Latvia — Luxembourg — Malta — Mexico — Montenegro — Morocco — Netherlands — New Zealand — North Macedonia — Norway — Philippines — Poland — Romania — Russian Federation — Senegal — Serbia — Singapore — Slovakia — Slovenia — South Africa — Spain — Sweden — Switzerland — Ukraine — United Kingdom — Uruguay — Venezuela