About me

Name

Arantxa Barcia

Role

Film director, art director
Co-founder, CCO, MITO AI

From

Pontevedra, Galicia, Spain

Based in

San Francisco, United States

Same person. Both sides of the frame.

Photography, code, Fashion & Film

Let’s make a film

Arantxa as a child in Galicia, holding a compact film camera up to her eye

Ext. A frame. First light.

My work sits where art direction meets the moving image.

Arantxa

(before pressing the shutter)

I began with a camera you wind by hand. I still shoot film, and I develop it at home.

One roll is thirty-six frames, so you have to know what you want before you press.

I studied film first and fashion afterwards, which is not the order anyone expects. Film gave me structure. Fashion gave me attention — it taught me a person has already told you who they are long before they have said a single word.

The coat, the shelf, the thing on the wall. Most of what anyone tells you about themselves, they tell you without ever speaking.

Int. The set / the edit.

I began with music videos, where you learn to make an image carry a feeling with no story to lean on. Then years of commercials. Thirty seconds, a brief, a client, and nothing allowed in the frame that is not doing work.

I use both daily. One gave me instinct, the other taught me to defend a decision out loud.

What I actually do lives across things that are supposed to stay separate.

Art direction: choosing the thirty-five books on a shelf nobody will stop to read. Nodes: wiring a graph in ComfyUI until a look survives a whole sequence and not just a single frame.

Wardrobe, texture, type, framing. Photography, still and moving. And code — I build my own tools in Claude Code, because waiting for someone else to build them is slower than writing them myself.

Int. San Francisco. Still directing.

I’m a co-founder and Chief Creative Officer at MITO AI, where we build the platform we needed and did not have.

A model gives you a shot;
it does not give you a film.

Deciding what a shot is for, what comes before it, and what has to be fixed by hand afterwards is still directing.

The work has gone to Zara, Movistar, Repsol, Laagam, Real Madrid and the Spanish national team; tour identity and stage visuals for DELLAFUENTE; and a nine-minute short I directed and graded: a hundred years of cinema, generated shot by shot and sewn together by hand.

I want someone to stop at something they would have walked past.

I work from San Francisco.