ALENYA
2025 · 3m · España
Directed by Catxo López
Genres: dark comedy, drama, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, melancholic
Sofía, an unemployed actress living in a squatted flat, agrees to license her image to an artificial intelligence so she can keep working in a profession with no room left for humans — but when she sets out to imitate her own digital avatar, she finds her dream of remaining an actress condemns her to vanish behind her cloned image.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
López takes the tired AI-steals-your-soul premise and actually inverts it—the nightmare isn't the algorithm, it's that Sofía becomes a better performer imitating her own fake self, which is genuinely perverse in a way that makes you uncomfortable in the right way.
A formally precise meditation on simulacrum and artistic death that sits comfortably in the lineage of Kaufman and Marker; the economy of its 3 minutes feels sculpted, each beat a deliberate note in a larger argument about presence and reproduction.
The masterstroke is the performance itself—watching Sofía consciously modulate her naturalness to match the AI's uncanny-valley precision, that micro-shift in her physical choices where she stops being and starts calculating, transforms a conceptual conceit into something brutally embodied.