The Trouble With Being Born

Dir. Sandra Wollner | Austria/Germany 2020 | 94 min | Drama/ Sci-Fi

Elli is an android and lives with a man she calls her father. She can recall memories of beach holidays and anything else he programs her to remember.

During the day they drift through the summer and at night he takes her to bed. Designed to resemble one of his memories, she seems very much alive -sometimes, she even seems to dream and yet, she remains a machine, a container for those memories that mean everything to him and nothing to her.

The story of a machine and the ghosts we all carry within us.

 

 

REVIEWS

…a groundbreaking study in the psychology and emotions of robot technology … marks Sandra Wollner as the most exciting European auteur of the year.
-SIMON FOSTER, DIRECTOR SYDNEY SCIENCE FICTION FILM FESTIVAL-

Wollner dismantles our cinematic understanding of artificial intelligence and leaves us with something much more frightening; a mirror into what makes us human.
-HUDSON SOWADA, DIRECTOR FANTASTIC FILM FESTIVAL-

..a distinctive and stylish film, ruminating on the existential human experience, memory, and emotional attachment. Sandra Wollner has found a unique cinematic approach to the notion of seeking avenues for transcendence via android means.
-PETER KRAUSZ, MOVIE METROPOLIS-

There’s more at issue here than mere provocation, with Wollner’s complex, artfully crafted, sometimes wilfully perplexing film delving boldly into questions of
memory, gender, identity and indeed film language.
-SCREEN INTERNATIONAL-

Austrian director Sandra Wollner’s disturbing, unsentimental vision of the fracturing effects of technology on human life and memory is both compassionate
and unsparing, and vivid in its hard-to-shake imagery.
-NEW DIRECTORS NEW FILMS 2020-

Striking intellectualism and icy formalism vie with a viscerally upsetting premise
-VARIETY-