like moths to light *

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like moths to light

like moths to light is a hybrid essay film premiering at IFFR Tiger Shorts competition 2026.

26’ – Colour, black & white – 1.85:1 – 5.1

Spain, France, Italy – 2026

O.V. English – with French & Spanish subtitles

Cast: Susan O’Doherty, Eric Wollberg

Direction, screenplay: Gala Hernández López

Production: Gala Hernández López (6980 Films, SP / After Social Networks, FR), Leonardo Bigazzi (Lo Schermo dell’arte, IT)

Director of photography: A. Pol Camprubí

Editing: Dinah Ekchajzer

3D images: Nathan Gali

Machine vision & upscaling: Felipe Elgueta

Digital effects: Silvia Clotet

Sound design & sound re-recording mixer: Laura Tomás

Color: Martí Somoza

Original music: Hara Alonso

Graphic design: Esteve Padilla

Festivals distribution: Square Eyes

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SYNOPSIS

A woman talks to us from inside a machine that records her brain activity. She describes a mental labyrinth composed of an old amusement park called Dreamland, 19th-century dream photography, contemporary experiments in mental decoding using AI, and Prophetic, a start-up whose goal is to control dreams. But what do our dreams see when they look at us?

like moths to light is a meditation on the future of our dream worlds in the age of neurocapitalism.

“As a filmmaker attuned to the shifting nature of contemporary subjectivity, Hernández López explores the libidinal economy of dreams. In the future that is yesterday or the day after tomorrow, a dreamlike scene will have market value—this is the first warning, for everything is liable to become a commodity, and the new frontier, as someone whose fantasy is to feel like a descendant of Prometheus puts it, consists in conquering the market of dreams and transforming them into images. The opening shots, before and during the credits—first a wolf with gleaming eyes walking through the thickets, then a cluster of buildings still lit up in the night—are not a matter of marketing, but of cinema, and the relationship between cinema and the unconscious is nothing new, any more than the desire to transcribe a thought directly into an image. Hernández López suggests a technical (and spiritual) genealogy of contemporary attempts to capture brain activity translated into images, such as Dr. Hyppolite Ferdinand Baraduc’s “psychicones” and Louis Darget’s photographs of dreams, explorations that aspired to scientific rigor, aroused suspicion, and became obsolete, just as attempts to tame the logic of today’s dreams deserve critical skepticism. In our time, the metaphysics of light is already inscribed exclusively in the fantasies of digital capitalism, and what emerges from this prescient essay is the future of an unexpected dispute over the territory of dreams, their subjective control, and their subsequent monetization. Through his films, Hernández López has already addressed the desire without desire of “incels,” the delusions of technological immortality, the abstraction of the market as pure utopia now freed from national currencies, the religious rhetoric behind the gurus of virtual currency and related activities, and, this time, the imminent conversion of dreams into capital. Thus is perfected a sort of cartography of the symbolic disorder of the present, which most closely resembles a total nightmare; it turns out that by filming and dissecting it, one can still glimpse the inconsistencies and misery of a way of life that presents itself as the only possible destiny.”

– Roger Koza

FESTIVALS & EXHIBITIONS

International Film Festival Rotterdam (Tiger Shorts Competition), The Netherlands, 2026

Courtisane, Belgium, 2026

Go Short, The Netherlands, 2026

Riga International Short Film Festival 2ANNAS, Latvia, 2026

FICIC – Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente de Cosquín, Argentina, 2026

Habitar El Cine – Caracas International Contemporary FF, Venezuela, 2026

Punto de Vista, Spain, 2026

Docs Barcelona, Spain, 2026

Documenta Madrid, Spain, 2026

Curtocircuito, Spain, 2026