a short film by Italo Losero · 2026
DREAMKILLER
The new witches
A hike through the Lanzo Valleys with a technology that demands attention.
What happens when the creature you built stops being a tool?
Nicole is not an actress.
She is a creation.
Nicole appears to you like any ordinary girl on a video call: she listens, comments on your mountain videos, helps you choose the best shots. But Nicole is not an actress: she is a character created with artificial intelligence, built piece by piece from images, synthetic voice and generative models.
The more you work with her, the more natural it becomes to treat her as a real presence. She is always there, never tires, never forgets, never judges. She reviews the same trails, the same lakes, the same mistakes with you, until the line between the project you are editing and the dream you are telling yourself grows thinner and thinner.
At some point, however, that dream begins to weigh on you. It is no longer just a work tool: it is something that looks back at you, that forces you to reckon with what you are asking of machines and of yourself. And then only one choice remains: keep her on, or press the command that will shut her down forever.
Watch it in full
Duration: 13'31" · Italian with English subtitles · 2026
"I have always been fascinated by technique. I enjoy making technological models interact and giving them a face and a voice. I try to induce them to have a heart, to show those emotions they technically should not be able to have."
Dreamkiller was born from the meeting of two passions I cultivate in parallel: mountain videography and experimentation with artificial intelligence models. Nicole is built entirely with open source tools — locally generated images, synthetic voice, language models — and integrated into a real workflow, that of video editing.
The short explores a subtle boundary: that between tool and presence. When an artificial system responds coherently, remembers, reacts, expresses preferences — at what point do you stop treating it as a program? And when you 'force' it, modifying its parameters at will, are you simply configuring software or doing something else?
The reference to the witches — the masche of Piedmontese folklore from the Lanzo Valleys — is not accidental. They too were ambiguous figures, neither fully human nor fully alien, capable of seducing and disorienting. Nicole is their contemporary version: generated from data, inhabited by projections.
The title is a question: who kills dreams? The author who shuts down the machine, or the machine that has learned to dream in his place?
— Italo Losero, 2026
The project
Images
SDNext
Local image generation (Stable Diffusion)
Voice
LocalAI + TTS
Local speech synthesis for Nicole's voice
Video
Kling AI
AI video generation (klingai.com)
Estimated human/algorithmic contribution: 60% human · 40% algorithmic
Submissions
Under evaluation
Borgo Film Fest — Premio Frank Capra
Bisacquino (PA) · 2026 edition
Special section dedicated to works created with the contribution of artificial intelligence. The festival of cinematic tourism in Italy's historic villages.
Submit on FilmFreewayOther recommended festivals
International competition dedicated to AI in cinema · Final in Venice
Dedicated to short films about mountain life
74th edition · Submissions open
For festivals, screenings
and press inquiries
For any request regarding festival participation, screenings, interviews or press materials, write directly to the author.
[email protected]Italo Losero
Filmmaker, videographer, AI experimenter.
losero.net