La Sombra Quimérica
2021 · 3m · España
Directed by Nacho Herranz
Genres: drama, experimental, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
The path you go by is like a forest where everything is full of fog, with trees so tall that they do not allow the rays of the sun to pass, where each path is exactly the same, making you lose your orientation; you can hear murmurs and see ghosts coming from the bottom of the earth, the sky is dyed with blood, and inertia pushes you to keep walking, feeling like a ghost.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Herranz takes the well-worn premise of psychological disorientation and refuses to resolve it—no redemptive turn, no clever twist, just a 3-minute descent into recursive dread that most festivals would call 'too bleak' and he calls honest. The murmurs and ghosts from the earth feel genuinely uncanny rather than goth-poetic, which is the move everyone else chickens out on.
A disciplined essay in visual repetition and tonal restraint that sits comfortably in the lineage of structural surrealism—Herranz deploys the fog and identical paths with the compositional control of someone who understands how form encodes meaning, though the melancholy occasionally threatens to flatten into aesthetic exercise.
The sound design choice—those murmurs layered underneath the visual repetition—is what separates this from a thousand other misty-forest mood pieces; it's the decision to make the audience *hear* the disorientation rather than just see it that transforms inertia into something you feel in your chest.