Quinzaine des Cinéastes is my favourite sidebar of Cannes Film Festival, it’s in this section that I made the most exciting discoveries throughout the years. Go in with an open mind and be ready for a wild cinematic ride…
Barbie will open this year’s Directors’ Fortnight! This Barbie is performed masterfully by Agnès Jaoui in Sophie Fillières’ magnificent final film, This Life of Mine. Three moments in a woman’s life: a comedy, a tragedy and an epiphany rolled into one. All of these strands are executed with a bang, with the breaks in tone and punchy dialogues that have always been the hallmark of Fillières’ cinema. It is also a terribly moving film, since it is a filmmaker’s very intimate self-portrait, to which Agnès Jaoui lends body and soul.
For her second feature, director Yôko Yamanaka has pulled out all the stops. Desert of Namibia follows a young woman with bipolar who burns the candle at both ends. A surprising, unidealised portrait of Gen-Z Tokyo: striking for its incredible energy and irreverence. The film’s highly physical direction is carried off by an extraordinary actress. With hints of Nobuhiro Suwa’s early films.
A counterpoint to her last feature, Saturn Bowling, Patricia Mazuy has created a film about female eman-cipation and sisterhood against a backdrop of class relations. In the lead roles, Isabelle Huppert and Hafsia Herzi forge an effective and affecting bond, built on a shared desire to put the past behind them and liberate themselves from male domination. No manicheism, no half-heartedness.
The first film from a passionate cinéphile, shot on a shoestring budget, Gazer revisits the codes of the paranoid thriller of the great masters of New Hollywood, with a touch of Cronenberg-esque horror. Shot on magnificent 16mm film stock, the film demonstrates astonishing mastery of directing, storyboarding and editing. We follow a magnetic young woman, played by Ariella Mastroianni who also co-wrote the film.
To celebrate their separation, a couple plans to throw a party. When they tell their friends and family, no one believes them. Jonás Trueba’s latest film is a modern “comedy of remarriage”. Quoting Stanley Cavell and Kierkegaard, The Other Way Around repeats the announcement of the couple’s separation over and over again in order to put the couple’s love to the test. The Other Way Around is a comedy that tenderly suggests that being a couple is also cinema.
A fantastical punk comedy, a feminist revenge film, and a revamped vampire movie rolled into one, Sister Midnight is an original, funny and macabre tale centred on a rebellious, misanthropic character. We follow the trials and tribulations of Uma – a young, newly-married woman – who discovers the realities of married life in a Bombay slum, and whose thirst for vengeance will not be abated
There will be at least one Christmas film at Cannes this year. For his third feature, Taormina revels in the joy of ceremony: in this case, a Christmas Eve get-together for a middle-class Italian-American family. This is the portrait of a microcosm, and a kind of farewell to adolescence. Producer and actor Michael Cera plays an unlikely policeman straight out of Supergrave or Twin Peaks. Francesca Scorsese and Sawyer Spielberg also feature in the film.
My first time covering Achtung Berlin has been a memorable experience. This most idiosyncratic of film festivals, a largely German affair for the complete enjoyment of which your German language skills would definitely come in handy, offered a truly eclectic line-up, from the forebodingly surreal and aesthetically accomplished Milk Teeth to other smaller, intimate films that, although flawed in certain respects, still captivated with their strong performances and sheer directing bravado, such as The Power of Love.
The festival also provided me with the opportunity to catch up with an incredibly talented and tenacious filmmaker, Sara Summa whose new film, Arthur and Diana, after touring many film festivals abroad and picking up many awards and prizes on the way, finally made its way to its home town, Berlin where, unsurprisingly, also picked up Best Film at the Awards Ceremony last night.
The film is a real joy ride, full of exuberance and joie de vivre but also touching on serious family topics in parts. Sara experimented a lot with the form and took many creative risks that another less adventurous filmmaker would be in awe of.
I sat down with Sara Summa at the wonderful Wolf Kino on Monday, the 15th of April 2024, during the film’s second screening in Berlin. The following interview is largely unedited and should flow as freely as the movie itself does…
Dana Knight: We met in 2022 in Locarno where you workshopped this film as part of the “Works in Progress” Lab. What happened since, what were the challenges of finishing this film?
Sara Summa: In Locarno we were in post-production with it, we were finishing editing, and we still had to do all the post-production, the image, the sound, and that took almost a year.
This experimental form that you see took a ton of work, we shot with video cameras from the 90s, and also with 16mm film camera, and we mixed these 3 formats, but the video material was then printed on 16mm, and then colour-graded and everything. But we had to colour-grade before printing, then we had to correct the images a lot, there was a lot of post-production wok on these images, then we had to print it, re-print it, and then retest the printing process because weird things happen when you print video images. It’s very very complex and nobody knows how it works, it’s so special and nobody does that. And we had to test so much, try out all kinds of things and find new programs to process the images and finally we got a good enough print and then we had to do the colour-grading all over again. It was a very long process.
Dana Knight: This explains a lot because in terms of film style, I felt I watched three different movies in one, which was a novel experience.
Sara Summa: That was the idea from the beginning to have these different camera formats mainly to have this very special look, these video images printed on film. Then we also added real filmed images because we felt like, why not? And the film itself wanted to be so free that we felt that this is something we can allow ourselves to do, to mix these formats. We printed everything and there is a certain cohesion, it does come together because there is one final formal, the 16mm print, which makes it come together more. But it was part of the idea to have this freedom and this eclecticism all over and in every respect.
Dana Knight: When you workshopped the film in Locarno, did you have to justify these aesthetic choices?
Sara Summa: No. We applied and they selected the film based on the materials we sent. And then we showed the edit we had at the time which was not post-produced at all. It was just the raw images, the video material mixed with 16mm material, not colour-graded, not printed on film, nothing, the image was very raw. And the sound was horrible.
Dana Knight: Because initially you recorded real location sound…
Sara Summa: Right, then there was a lot of postproduction and sound design that went into it. And music and so on. And all that was not finished at all. What we showed in Locarno was missing a big part of the film, it was not a final edit but very close. We just showed it. At “First Look” programs, that’s all you need. And you tell them briefly where you’re at with your process and that’s it. And that convinced the Jury because we got an award.
Dana Knight: And did you subsequently go to other workshops with the film?
Sara Summa: No.
Dana Knight: Cool. I know the film premiered in Toronto last year…
Sara Summa: [… ] Yes, Toronto was great. In the Discovery section. The audiences there were very reactive and asked more questions, it was very nice. And the programmer of the Discovery section was in love with the film, we had a great welcome there.
My experience so far has been that audiences respond very well to the film because it is a very comedic film, it’s very light, it’s full of joie de vivre. Joy and love and family and life and Lupo…And that makes it so much more accessible than my first film which was very much a (Berlinale) Forum film.
Dana Knight: So going back to what the challenges were, did you have to sort out everything yourself, were you in charge with every aspect of the movie?
Sara Summa: Well, we had experts for the colour-grading but they also did not know because it’s a trial and error process. Because nobody is doing this process and we were inventing something in a way. And we had to go through all the steps of testing everything to see what could come out of it. We’re very happy with the result, the film has quite a unique look.
Dana Knight: The film takes you on an adventure, it’s a road trip. Watching it you have no idea how it’s going to turn out, you have the impression that anything could happen at any time!
Sara Summa: (laughing) Indeed.
Dana Knight: The first visual thing that struck me was that sequence of facial close-ups at the beginning, where you see the genetic links between these characters, they are a family!
Sara Summa: I love that you noticed that.
Dana Knight: Your brother, your two-year old Lupo and yourself, all chewing. The action of chewing has never been so funny in a film before!
Sara Summa: Yes, Diana eats a lot in this film.
Dana Knight: So I loved the way you visually set up the family unit.
Sara Summa: I’m happy that you picked up on that because I also loved putting these three faces next to each other and really feeling in the traits of the faces that we are family, there’s no doubt about it.
Dana Knight: Then there’s tension, then there’s relief from tension. Comedic relief. And you’re quite the singer…A lot of entertainment going on.
Sara Summa: (laughing)
Dana Knight: In terms of the comedy, I felt that you were influenced by Tati, with physical comedy, in the scene where you’re on the phone and you get near that supermarket door that starts opening and closing.
Sara Summa: That’s wonderful. I did not do it consciously but I am sure he is there somewhere in my subconscious. Absolutely.
Dana Knight: Then there are other types of comedy. Based on repetition, like in the ‘making out’ scene. That was very funny. The same gesture was repeated three times, right?
Sara Summa: (laughing) yes.
Dana Knight: Then, there are contrasting actions, e.g the funeral scene with Lupo in the foreground making all kinds of noises. You obviously love comedy, I was wondering what are your comedy heroes?
Sara Summa: I love comedy but I rarely think about it in such a conscious way. I enjoy humour. But when I think of influences, I think of much broader directors of the past, obviously Cassavetes is someone whose work I think about. For his freedom, for his work with the actors, Gena Rowlands, for the freedom in the flow of dramaturgy. The connections between these characters and the neuroses that are carried by these people. And a lot of talking, language carries a lot, in a free-flowing kind of way. For me, comedy comes from life. It’s almost more that that inspires me in a comedic direction. But contrast is very important to me, always, in every respect, not only when I think of comedy. But using real people with their real family dynamics but thrown into a fiction, that was the contrast that tickled my curiosity to begin with.
I can’t think of specific names or films but I love cinema and I feed myself with a lot of films and then I let them drop in the background and hopefully try not to copy anyone. I just do what I feel I have to do. For sure there are a lot of influences there that I can’t always name.
Dana Knight: You experimented a lot with the form and also created some strikingscenes, such as the long, slow drive through the landscape with the voice-off in which you reach the climax of your anger…I was wondering why you chose to set up that scene in that way.
Sara Summa: It’s contrast, that’s one of the aesthetic means that I work with the most. We also worked very closely together with my DOP, Faraz Fesharaki. He was the one who thought a bit in the direction of that shot, this idea of being very distant, looking from very far away and then we experimented a bit. We also spent a lot of time doing location scouting to gauge if that was possible at all. Some of the comedic elements of that scene were almost sacrificed for the purposes of this long shot, because for instance you don’t see that the trunk is open on the car because it’s from very far away. And the idea was that we as the viewer see it the whole time from afar but the characters in the car are not conscious that they are driving with this trunk open, until the police woman stops them.
Dana Knight: That’s a very funny scene, is the police woman a professional actor?
Sara Summa: Yes.
Dana Knight: Talking about performances, your bother did a brilliant job in that scene and he’s not a professional actor, is he?
Sara Summa: He’s not. But we both have background acting. Because our dad was a theatre director and we both started acting as children in theatre plays and some films but then we did not pursue it as a career. But we always acted. And he is an artist, and he does dabble in acting occasionally but he’s not pursuing it as a career. We both have fun acting sometimes, I’d be happy to do it again but not in my own movies, this was just an one-off thing.
Dana Knight: Considering your script is auto fiction, did your brother struggle at all with the lines that you wrote for him?
Sara Summa: That’s interesting because it’s not us but it does feed on our real tensions. It’s not our real conflicts, the characters are not us, they are a sort of caricature of us and taking some bits and pieces of our idiosyncratic ways of being or our neuroses and making them much bigger or a bit different, playing with these elements. So Arthur is a version or caricature of my brother…. We worked together in rehearsals to find some elements to characterise these characters and make them different from us, to find elements that would turn them into fictional characters.
Dana Knight: That stand on their own.
Sara Summa: Exactly. And that would help us have a distance from these characters and their stories. We’re just impersonating these characters. They are mimicking our relationship and our lives in a way but at the same time not. It’s auto fictional but not autobiographical. Autofiction is this weird performative piece of art of throwing yourself in front of a camera into a fictional environment but you’re a real person who’s interacting with her real brother, and you have your real son who’s the son in the film…It was interesting, it was a process to get to these characters.
As an actor you’re always bringing something from yourself also into your character, even when you’re not playing a character that’s close to who you are but you’re going to make it your own, that’s what actors do, they bring out things from their inner selves. That’s why you recognise most actors even when they are doing a role that is so different, you recognise their way of being somehow.
It was good that we put that distance, for my brother especially because the film touches on topics that are not painful necessarily but more intimate and it was good that it felt fictional so that one can actually act these parts out and not feel like putting oneself naked in front of an audience. That’s not what the goal was, it was not the purpose of the exercise.
Dana Knight: And Lupo was probably the only one who did not need any distance, he could be totally himself!
Sara Summa: (laughing) Indeed. At the same time, he’s a two year old child, he is in the here and now. But he was very conscious of the process, he knew we were shooting a movie, in the morning he would be like, “are these my clothes, is this my costume for the day”?
Dana Knight: I find that amazing, that he had an understanding of what was going on.
Sara Summa: Totally. He knew and he would ask, “are we working today, mommy?” But then as soon as he was in the scene, he forgot that there were twenty people around filming and propping and he was in the moment with his uncle, his real mother and the other people whom he became friends with anyway.
And the funny thing is that repetition is something they love doing, it’s like a game. So he repeated the same actions on and on, because we took many takes of everything. Some things were offered by him, things he just did. And I would be like “wow this is great, let’s hope he does that again”. And he did it again and again and again. It’s also because he’s a littler performer, he loves performing and being admired. He could feel he had an audience in us, that we loved what he was doing. So he would repeat that game. When we’d say, “ok let’s do it one more time”, he was just thrilled to do it again. And he would do the same thing but lose himself in the moment again, he was very very real.
Dana Knight: Yes I was impressed, also because he never looks at the camera. Did you tell him to not look at the camera?
Sara Summa: I guess I did a couple of times but he was also concentrated on what he was doing.
Dana Knight: There is a scene in which you get angry and have a go at your brother, then you turn over to him to comfort him as he looked a bit scared.
Sara Summa: That’s a scene we had to shoot nine times because it’s a one-take scene and we’re driving through a very complicated path through the city. So we had to repeat many times because four actors in a car, a scene that is maybe seven minutes long and that could not be cut, and it’s intense and it needs to work. So every time we did it he had a different reaction. In the beginning, I told him, “Listen, I’m going to get angry but it’s a game, it’s funny, don’t worry”. So there are a few takes where he laughed, which was not what I wanted then. At some point I had to tell him, “It’s funny but not that funny, it’s a little bit sad too”. Because there aren’t that many moments in her film where it gets very serious or where the emotion crystallises, and this was one of them. So it should not have been too immediately broken by something funny.
Dana Knight: What scene was the most challenging to shoot?
Sara Summa: I’m not sure I remember anymore. Sometimes we had to reshoot for technical reasons, for example the scene at the airport, it’s was very difficult to shoot, we were with a steady cam that had to be flipped around, we were shooting on a 16 mm camera which was too heavy to be the right was around so the camera was flipped around and the steady cam operator could not see very clearly where he was going, we were in a big hall with lots of people, a real place, so it was very dangerous. He had to be pulled by other operators and it was very difficult to get the right frame because we were all in movement and running. So that’s another scene we did many times but there was not much acting involved, just for technical reasons.
And the scenes where Lupo is the main focus, those were shot with a concept for the scene that was a bit free, with the camera on a tripod and we had quite close shots. And we did the scene again and again because the DOP Faraz followed one person only. And when we did it again he would follow another person and then the third person and then I edited all this material, I did all the editing myself.
Dana Knight: All in all, I feel you’ve taken many risks with this film, creative and otherwise, do you agree?
Sara Summa: True, we had lots of elements that could have taken fire in the middle of the shoot, it was a real adventure. We wanted to capture life, all the film is scripted, every shot was planned but we were also trying to remain aware of the world and the adventure we were going on and we were trying to capture whatever surprise could come our way. That was only possible because we were such a tight group of people who really knew how to work creatively with each other.
What makes the soul of this film is that everyone involved worked very closely together as a team, family members and friends, very dear collaborators for me. It was a real adventure we took together, we went on a real rod trip through Europe and so many things could have gone wrong because we had a very limited budget and we had a broken car from the 80s.
Dana Knight: The film was shown to Berliners as part of Achtung Film Festival last night at Babylon cinema and today again at the wonderful Wolf Cinema, what is your relationship to this festival?
Sara Summa: I’ve attended Achtung before as an audience member, it’s a festival that is very Berlin-based, and then you meet often the same people and the same directors come back. There’s something very nice about that. For us it was wonderful to show the film in Berlin because the team is here. We’ve been to lots of festivals so far but very far away. We were in Toronto for the world premiere, we went to Mar del Plata, I won Best Interpretation there. Then we went to Valladolid in Spain where we won the Special Jury Award, then at another film festival in Germany, where I won Best Directing, we were in Greece, in Trieste, then in New York, at the Museum of Moving Image, the MoMI, it’s called First Look. Going to Istanbul next week.
But it was a great opportunity to present the film in our home town where the film was born. I was alone on all these trips and I haven’t had an opportunity to really celebrate with my team. Because this film lives from the work of all these wonderful creative people.
Besides Best Film, Arthur and Diana also received the Best Production Award (Beste Produktion) for Cecilia Trautvetter und Lisa Roling.
ARTHUR & DIANA von Sara Summa, Deutschland 2023 / Buch Sara Summa mit Lupo Piero Summa, Robin Summa, Sara Summa, Livia Antonelli, Claire Loiseau Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin, Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg
It is often said that a short film should be like a perfect sentence. In this sense, Sojourn to Shangri-La is more like a perfectly meandering paragraph. Although not immediately apparent, the narrative meandering is for a reason: starting from the ironic premise of a fashion commercial gone awry, Lin Yihan’s inquisitive camera takes you away from the high adrenaline and petty arguments of the film set to something calmer, more ethereal and extremely visually satisfying. The change in mood is so smooth, almost imperceptible, as is the transition from realism into the magical realm.
A sensitive, thoughtful and captivating short film from a fresh voice in contemporary Chinese cinema, Lin Yihan.
I caught up with the Shanghai-based Yihan over Zoom after the film’s Berlinale premiere to find out more about her vision, the themes close to her heart and what kind of cinema she’s pursuing with her first feature film project.
Dana Knight: I loved the film’s title, it’s so poetic, it makes you dream. The perfect title for this short. Does the fictional space of Shangri-La have a special significance for you?
Lin Yihan: I first thought of the title in Chinese and it means “paying a visit to a historical site”. But when I translated it into English I thought the fictional literary term Shangri-La is a good translation, it refers to a dreamland. This is a space where the character could break the barriers of communication and dissolve into the environment. The place is a wonderland for the character. Also Shangri-La is used nowadays in commercials and hotels to create fantasy for the consumers, and the film crew in the film is shooting a fashion commercial. So the title is referring to something very beautiful but maybe it’s just fictional.
Dana Knight:I actually read that this fictional name has now been given to a region in China that has this other worldly beauty. So it has become a real geographic location.
Lin Yihan: Yes, that is true, but I am not referring to the real place, I am interested more in its fictional connotations. As to the location where we shot the film, it’s in the South-Eastern part of China, the province of Fujian. At first I wanted to shoot in Shanghai. The starting point for this movie is based on a real experience of my friend, she worked as an art assistant and an important installation just vanished on the day of the shoot. That happened in Shanghai. But we ran into a lot of trouble in pre-production, it was 2022 and we were still suffering from the covid lockdown. That’s why I decided to shoot it in my home town which has a beautiful seaside beach.
Dana Knight:I sensed a fascination with nature in your film. There is the film within the film but the driving force of the movie comes from something else. You captured those beautiful black and while drone shots of the sea. The theme seems to contrast nature and culture. Showing the permanence of nature as opposed to the impermanence of cultural constructs, such as the lost installation we ironically never get to see, except very briefly at the end, seems to be the whole point.
Lin Yihan: What I wanted to do with the film at the very beginning, when I worked in the commercial production company, I particularly enjoyed those fleeting moments when I could step out of the huge studios and watch beautiful sunsets. Then I had a huge sense of rupture between these two spaces. The studios had this intense human activity driven by capital but outside the studio it’s tranquil and eternal nature. I also felt no one in the studio shared my feelings. So I wanted to shoot a film just to showcase this emotion.
Regarding the experience of my friend, I was touched by the subtle conflicts in it. So I decided to adapt this experience and give it a dramatic structure.
Dana Knight:And the unfolding drama is cut short when the drone takes us away from it, bringing a fresh and surprising element to the film.
The drone is a key element in it because it’s a tool generated by contemporary technology. It has been used a lot in the commercial production to achieve a certain kind of “steady” and “perfect” image. I think that’s something very mechanical. I hope to show how a “human’s” perspective can be injected into it. Maybe it can take us to a different perspective that exceeds the constraints of our body. And it gives us a higher perspective to look at the whole thing, it can take us out of the tiny arguments and accident, to look at the grandeur of nature.
Dana Knight:Talking about the arguments in the film, these are quite funny, you’re clearly poking fun at the hierarchies that exist on a big commercial production, with the stress and sense of emptiness it imparts. I hope your own experience of shooting this film was pleasant in comparison.
Lin Yihan: It was a totally different experience compared with working on commercials where you’re working for a client, you have to do whatever they want. For my own film, most of the crew are my friends, we are a group of friends being together and creating something. But we also met with some challenges that actually came from nature. Because we had to recreate the tide, it’s a very important element of the story so we needed to make it look real. We had to arrange our shooting schedule according to the time of the tide. There is a scene of the testing of the light.
Dana Knight:That shot was beautiful, it reminded me of Bergman, he created many scenes with the sea as a backdrop, was he a reference for you?
Lin Yihan: Yes, the black and white texture is inspired from Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. So in that scene, the tide was coming up, it was a very intense scene.
Dana Knight:The music was subtle but very effective, the perfect accompaniment to the dreamy images with the drone surveilling the sea. Who composed the music?
Lin Yihan: Both my sound design and music are from the same person, her name is Sophia Shen, she is a friend of mine, she does experimental music. So she looked at the images and composed the music that spontaneously came to her mind. The idea was to render this sense of wonderland and feeling of escape, creating another dimension, another space, just with sound and music.
Dana Knight:Also the muffled speech sound in the scene with the villager brought to mind Bruno Dumont’s Berlinale competition film The Empire, his supernatural beings communicate in a similar way, have you seen it? You both created similar scenes…
Lin Yihan: No, I haven’t.
Dana Knight:The lost installation speaks to the theme of the fragility of human constructs which seems dear to your heart, is that a correct assumption?
Lin Yihan: Yes, when I was working on commercials, I realised how much money is invested in these productions or installations. And I often felt it’s a huge waste. I think sometimes the efforts of humans are not so meaningful. For myself, I strive to organise my productions in a more economical or efficient way.
Dana Knight:Sustainable cinema...
Lin Yihan: Yes, that’s the word I was looking for.
Dana Knight:You’re also an artist, I guess you’re pursuing the same themes in your art practice.
Lin Yihan: Yes, I am always fascinated by a space, or a character interacting with a space. Or the connection between humans and nature. Or something more magical happening during mundane life. This is what I want to explore.
Dana Knight:Apart from Bergman, what other filmmakers inspire you?
Lin Yihan: Antonioni influenced me a lot in terms of spatiality, especially the connection between characters and space and how a space gazes back at the characters.
Also a director from Thailand, Apichatpong. I think we grew up in very similar backgrounds, my town has a very rich folklore too, and there are temples everywhere. What I share with him is the concept that an individual can take many forms, he or she can be a human, an animal or a deity. The boundary is blurry.
Dana Knight:You’re working on feature film, what can you tell me about it?
Lin Yihan: Yes, I just completed the script. It’s a contemporary adaptation of a folk story about a goddess who protects women and children during child birth in our local region.
Dana Knight:The short has an unconventional narrative structure, you experimented with narrative forms. Shall we expect something similar from your first feature film or do you feel more constrained to embrace a more mainstream type of narration?
Lin Yihan: I actually don’t like conventional structures or dramatic conflict. I hope to focus more on the state of a character and to create a sensory experience, in the way Lucretia Martel does. Maybe you can’t see a complete story in her films but you get sense of an atmosphere, a sensory experience from sound and image.
Dana Knight:Talking about sensory experience, are you working in VR as well?
Lin Yihan: Currently I’m not. I did have experimental projects related to VR when I was a student, but right now I feel that when trying to complete a mature project, it’s a whole different system compared with traditional cinema on the screen. And the way of watching is limited because of the device you have to wear. In the future maybe it’ll be as common as the 3D movie, but still it needs a new system of storytelling to fit. And I don’t think I can enter this other world before I study the traditional screen thoroughly.
In terms of creating a sensory experience, I think VR is like a more simple and direct way to throw you into a virtual space. But traditional cinema on the screen is like doing the subtraction, it’s about hints, stimulation and the endless associations a person can generate, and I think good literature does the same thing.
The death of a loved one isn’t easy to bear and the grieving process can take forever for some people, especially those that don’t feel any affinity for religion.
Humans have a deeply entrenched desire to transcend death. This is a common theme in countless myths and literary creations, from Gilgamesh, who undertook a long and perilous journey to discover the secret of eternal life, to the obsessive lamentations over our mortal nature in the romantic poets of the 19th century.
It used to be that the only way to transcend death was through artistic acts, and this ability belonged to the gifted few. But nowadays, thanks to AI-enhanced technology, this process has become more democratic, now everyone can become immortal since these technologies can capture the very essence of what makes someone unique (or so they boast) and preserve that for eternity.
As morbid as it sounds, Skyping with the dead might be the next big thing…The early adopters of this revolutionary tech testify to its benefits and addictiveness in a mind-blowing documentary,Eternal You, which premiered at Sundace 2024 and is now doing the festival circuit.
I sat down with the directing duo Moritz Riesewieck & Hans Block in March 2024 during Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival to find out more about their background, choice of subject matter and what they learnt about human nature though making this documentary that goes to the very core of what it means to be human…
Dana Knight: How did you become a filmmaking duo & what other films have you made previous to this?
Moritz Riesewieck: We met during our theatre studies in 2010, we both studied theatre directing in Berlin, we were in the same class. Both of us had a desire to not only work on Shakespeare and similar plays but also develop our own plays based on research. This is why we started researching the topic of content moderation that became our first film, The Cleaners, this film premiered in Sundance in 2018.
This topic was hardly known, it’s about who decides what we get to see online and what we don’t, all the images and videos which are uploaded on social media can not only screened by AI because it’s too difficult to distinguish what is cruel, disturbing, inappropriate, what should be deleted for different reasons. They hire thousands of people, outsourcing companies, based in the Philippines among others. We met a lot of abused workers from the Philippines and made a portrait of the difficulties they face when moderating and taking all those complex decisions about what to delete and what not.
We used all the footage we found during the research. We also wrote a play and a book about the subject. Same for this film. We also developed two other plays with other writers.
Dana Knight: Theatre, films and books, you guys are so productive. Is the book based on Eternal You out already?
Yes, the German language version. Also the Italian and Korean editions, hopefully there will be more translations.
Dana Knight: The subject of afterlife technology is not very well known, have you come across it by chance?
Moritz Riesewieck: We really just stumbled upon it, we were researching a lot of tech-related topics and in one of the forums there was an advertisment for it. We clicked on it. It was really a coincidence.
Hans Block: At the time we were touring around the world with The Cleaners and while touring we discovered a website called Become Virtually Immortal, a Romanian fellow was behind it. He had no product at the beginning but he had more than 40,000 people on his waiting list. He was a startup founder, he had different startups. All he had back then was an empty web page but a lot of traffic. He tried to work on it but he didn’t finish the final product.
Dana Knight: Could you tell me more about the Romanian entrepreneur you first discovered? And was your first research trip to Romania as a consequence?
Hans Block: The guy behind this website is called Marius Ursache, he lives in Iasi and he was actually not the first one. There was another guy, Henrique Jorge in Portugal, we met him, he also had an interesting idea, he recreated a FB-looking webpage, a social networking page where you have your own profile and your digital doppelgänger. And the more you post on this social networking page, the more data feeds into your digital doppelgänger which becomes autonomous and posthumous.
Dana Knight: Ok, this product sounds different, it’s targeted at living people who can create their afterlife avatar for their relatives.
Hans Block: Yes. And because you need data for it, his proposal was, “Well, just come to my social network and I’ll collect all your data and using digital algorithms I’ll create your digital doppelgänger.
Dana Knight: In this way people could have some control over their afterlife avatar I assume. This product could go into a life insurance package!
Moritz Riesewieck: (laughing) Exactly!
Hans Block: After the guy in Portugal, we went to Romania and spent some time with Marius Ursache.
Dana Knight: And what exactly was his vision?
Moritz Riesewieck: His vision was what we now see accomplished by other companies: to use all the data we leave on our smartphones every day, communication data, whatsapp, other messenger services. Then our Google data, our voice when we leave voice messages and so on and so forth. Then have an AI, or algorithm back then, analyse all this data and find out the personality or “the essence” of the person. He was one of the first who envisioned that.
Hans Block: He pitched it like “Skyping with dead people”. He already got the interest of MIT, that’s why he earned this grant, he was collaborating with them. That gave us trust that there must be more behind it but we noticed that the culture at MIT was to promise a lot even if you don’t know how to deliver. But the vision survived, now it’s quite productive.
Dana Knight: After Portugal and Romania, did you go straight to US to meet with the guy behind Project December?
Hans Block: Yes. There was an article published by the San Francisco Chronicle written by a Canadian guy, Joshua, who published his chat protocol with his decreased girlfriend, Jessica, who died a few years before. We tried to contact him and it took us a while and we finally met him and tried to find out why he used Project December, why was it so important for him to have a couple more conversations with his decreased girlfriend, to spend time with her.
He told us that death was taboo, that it’s complicated to grieve in the Western World, he was grieving for a long time. And we found this big universe of Project December which is a US-based company presenting a chatbot service that enables you to chat with deceased people. Then we met with the founder of Project December, Jason Rohrer, and filmed with him. He got us in contact with more members of his project and we spoke with a lot of people who were using it and learnt about their experiences, why they used it, what were their problems, etc.
Dana Knight: Was everyone open to speaking with you on camera?
Moritz Riesewieck: There is one former Google engineer who also founded a company and they were completely unwilling to talk to us. They were very relevant for us because they had the knowledge and also the finance. This page is used a lot today by people grieving.
Dana Knight: The documentary mentions that Big Tech is in on it now, a bit late to the game, no?
Moritz Riesewieck: Yes and they are still a bit reluctant. They have a double face strategy to send test balloons and see how the audience reacts. This is what Microsoft did, they saved the patent to make people digitally immortal by chatbots. But when they were faced with a lot of criticism, they argued that they were not planning to realise it right now. But that only after heavy criticism. So it seems that they are waiting for the right moment to enter the market and industry analysts tell us that it’s only a matter of time before they enter the market. Because they actually have the capacity to deploy the AI.
Dana Knight: When did the media criticism come and which media outlets covered the story?
Moritz Riesewieck: This attack in the press took place in 2020, this is when journalists found out that Microsoft saved this patent. It came out in Forbes, The Guardian, NY Times etc.
Dana Knight: I have mixed feelings about this technology. There is a scene in which one of your documentary participants is messaging with her dead ex desperately asking him if he is “in a better place now.” When he confirms, she appears so relieved, “ I really need to hear this”. This could give an alternative title to the film, “The lies we need to hear”…
Moritz Riesewieck: Oh that’s a good one.
Dana Knight: On the other hand, there is the heartbreaking segment with the Korean mother who’s grieving after her little daughter, that kind of VR tech could have psychological benefits but this also needs to be tested & assessed first.
Hans Block: Indeed. And that’s where the difference lies. When you have psychological counselling, you can rely on a qualified psychologist or psychiatrist to guide you and control your experience, to make sure you’re not harmed by it. But the tech engineers don’t take any responsibility, it’s all an open experiment and if it goes wrong, it can go really wrong.
Moritz Riesewieck: It’s coming though, it’s not in the future, they have already tested bots in the psychological sphere.
Dana Knight: What universities were interested?
Moritz Riesewieck: There are studies at Cambridge and Harvard I think. They tested psychological therapy bots. Because we have a loneliness crisis in the world and so many people out there need psychological help.
Dana Knight: But how about afterlife tech, has this been tested?
Moritz Riesewieck: No, not afterlife tech. But they tested bots for psychological counselling and the results were stunning, the bots had even better results than human beings in the first sessions!
So it’s not that I find it very good that this exists but I wanted to mention that there is definitely something coming, the new tech will be backed-up scientifically. We only need a couple of years for the afterlife technologies.
Dana Knight: There’s quite a gap between these two use cases, loneliness and communicating with the dead. You would need to believe in the afterlife in the first place, no?
Hans Block: To us in the beginning it seemed naive too, to believe that the entity on the other side is human at all, the tech is still full of flaws so you should be able to distinguish between the one and the other. We met with an expert from MIT who is in the film and she has made studies in the last two decades on why super qualified, clever, educated people fall for these technologies and anthropomorphise them. And her conclusion is that it does not matter at all what your background or IQ is, even the developers of these technologies can be seduced and deceived by them. She made a lot of experiments and deconstructed robots in front of these people and rebuilt them. And afterwards the subjects of the experiments completely forgot what they had just seen, that everything is only a matter of mechanics, robots, that there is nothing human about them. But it’s in our nature, we humans also anthropomorphise animals in all kinds of animated things.
Dana Knight: I think also the human capacity for self-deception plays a role…
Hans Block: That’s also true. And people generally think that a robot only becomes dangerous when it develops a consciousness. But that is the misleading thought, so many people argue like this: as long as they don’t build a conscious machine, we don’t have to worry about it. But that’s not true.
Based on our experience and research for this film we feel that it does not matter actually if the machine is fully conscious or not because it can already make people believe that there’s a full blown copy of the deceased person behind it.
Dana Knight: I guess this tech could work on certain people but not everyone.
Moritz Riesewieck: I wouldn’t say so.
Dana Knight: The doc argues that this afterlife tech replaces religion, that it has arrived at this point in time because we are disconnected from religion.
Hans Block: Studies say that in the western world right now there are less and less people who believe in religion. But at the same time some people believe that there is something after death. So what is it? And these tech companies are clever, they build a new narrative around that belief. The tech is physical, you can interact with it, it’s very concrete. You type in something and you get an answer, you can hear the voice of the deceased person…So AI becomes God-like, it’s an epochal change, until now religion had a lot of power in society, now it’s AI.
And because AI can be so powerful, it’s very important that we look very closely at the founders of these technologies, like Jason Rohrer. And what we see is that he has a very limited world view but is creating something that has a lot of meaning for many people.
Dana Knight: What do you mean by a limited world view in this case?
Hans Block: He would agree with me I think, he’s a libertarian American, he would maybe state he’s an anarchist and he believes in self-responsibility. He lives with his kids, home schooling them in New Hampshire. This is the state with less rules compared with the rest of the US. He was not wearing masks when Covid hit, because it’s his self-responsibility, if he wants to protect himself or not. That’s why he’s very strict and he told us again and again and again that he is not taking any responsibility for the users of his tech products because they need to check for themselves if they are capable to benefit from it or not. And this is very complicated because the people using this kind of tech are not completely stable mentally, they are vulnerable, they are facing the death of their loved ones, they need psychological support.
Dana Knight: In a therapeutic context however, this kind of tech could be a useful tool but it feels exploitative if it’s marketed direct to consumer.
Hans Block: Yes, if someone is in a desperate state, they will try anything. A lot of people told us, “I just wanted to try it out”. And then they become completely addicted.
Moritz Riesewieck: What we’re really happy about are the debates after the screenings. Our approach was to step back a little bit and not give our opinion too easily in the film. But this also makes people think twice and stay curious and open. And discover the attitudes and reactions of other people.
Hans Block: We like to surprise people. Before we made the film, the general opinion was that this tech is so creepy, there was a certain reluctance in the audience to engage with the idea. But our goal was to make people shift from their initial position, to want to try it out or at least to understand why some people might be inclined to use such tech
Moritz Riesewieck: Or to understand why it’s so seductive. Otherwise we missed the point why it’s so dangerous.
Home Sweet Home, the first documentary I saw at Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival last week, proved to also be one of the most compelling, both thematically and conceptually. And this in spite of a very strong line-up made up of some of the best documentaries screening at festivals this year.
The filmmaker, Annika Mayer, artfully put together an immersive narrative about the dark side of domesticity and the invisibility of domestic violence using Super8 recordings that her grandparents shot in the 60s, whilst showing how all this is still relevant today by confronting the viewer with some horrendous statistics at the end.
The very first images struck me as reminiscent of the opening sequence of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet: an idyllic, pristine setting with a fancy house and a beautiful garden in a small town, in Germany we find out. It’s the time of the German “Economic Miracle”: the members of the nuclear family look happy, enjoying their vacation in the North Sea, or their Sunday trip to the National Garden Show.
But behind this artificial facade, another reality is lurking, quasi invisible to the naked eye. In order to reveal the truth, the filmmaker looks behind the images and digs deeper, fumbling through the furthest recesses of her grandma’s memory, in a delicate and sensitive manner, unearthing a painful story that all the family members knew but rarely spoke about.
Grandma Rose is the main star of the film, it’s through her narration that the secrets and lies of post-war West German family life gradually come to light. And if only this kind of trauma belonged in the past…
I sat down with the filmmaker Annika Mayer to find out more about her film projects, the topic of partner violence and how the story of her grandma is still relevant to us today.
Dana Knight: What is your background and what led you to making this documentary?
Annika Mayer: I come from cultural anthropology, then I focused on visual anthropology but I decided not to go into academia and to make documentaries instead. I edited a feature documentary, then I moved to Berlin and studied editing at The Film School. Then I set up a production company with a friend because it is really hard to find producers.
I want to make a feature film about the structural problems that cause domestic violence but I thought I should start with my own family. I knew about my grandmother’s story so at the beginning I just went with an audio recorder and asked her questions and I was quite surprised that she was willing to talk on camera. And then I went with the camera and filmed at home. Then my parents moved and said they were going to throw away the Super8 material from my grandparents. … But to her defence, my mum kept the material all this time, my father would have thrown it away much earlier.
Dana Knight: I was very impressed with the quality of the Super8 material, I thought the person who shot it must have had ambitions of becoming a filmmaker because you have interesting close-ups, details, it’s not just another home video. Was it your grandfather who shot most of it?
Annika Mayer: No, my grandmother said they both did. I was also very amazed that they were quite talented in a way.
Dana Knight: How many hours of footage did they shoot and over what period?
Annika Mayer: It was from ’58 to ’72. But most of the footage is from the ‘60s. Then some scenes from the ‘70s when they went to Bulgaria with a ship. When we see them driving away, that’s the last image I have. In total, 1H 45min…So I used a lot of the material.
Dana Knight: Was shooting on Super8 fashionable at the time?
Annika Mayer: You had to have money for Super8 of course, my grandparents were well-off. It was just a way, when the children came, to manifest family life. In Western Germany, if people had money, they would buy a Super8 camera. But not so many people had it, it was more of a class thing.
Dana Knight: The opening scene reminded me of Blue Velvet: all that resplendent greenery, the beautiful house, sunshine, the idyllic facade. Then it all starts to unravel, there is a dark reality lurking underneath. That was a perfect opening sequence but did you have David Lynch in mind?
Annika Mayer: No but now that you mentioned it I see the connection. My intention was to show how the West Germany perfect family life was constructed. What was striking to me when I read about it is that after the war families were very broken, many men died, some men came back. So women married the brother or uncles, leading to all kinds of family constellations. Or just women living together with the children. In West Germany they created a family ministry and it was very conservative and influenced by the church, so they had this image of the perfect nuclear family: the father, the mother and two children, the man goes to work, the woman stays at home and cares for the children. That was the atmosphere in West Germany, a lot of women did not work. In East Germany it was different. So I wanted to have that context at the beginning of the film.
Dana Knight: Your grandparents appeared to have the perfect family life that West Germany wanted to put forward. Was the domestic violence a secret in your family, how did you find out about it?
Annika Mayer: Within the family, it hasn’t been a secret. My granddad died when I was 10. I heard about it a little later. First from my dad then from my grandmother. It was never a secret in our family but it wasn’t a thing they would openly speak about either, with friends for instance.
Dana Knight: Would you say it is quite unusual for a German woman of that generation to open up emotionally?
Annika Mayer: Yes, very unusual. I have a very trusting relationship with my grandma and also she thought that I’m doing this little research thing, she did not expect this film to play in film festivals. So she was super open to talk to me about it and I was also quite astonished that she was willing to speak so openly. She always said this is a closed chapter for her and that she is fine. I’m not completely sure that’s true. For her it was a very dark chapter in her life, she had a better time afterwards.
Dana Knight: A chapter that lasted over 20 years…because the domestic violence in her case started right at the beginning.
Annika Mayer: Yes, a very long chapter.
Dana Knight: And it was actually your father who put a stop to it, he was her saviour.
Annika Mayer: Yes, when my father was studying in Mannheim, he would come home to make sure she locked the door to her bedroom before she went to sleep so my grandfather couldn’t enter. At one point he said, ‘Look, I’m gonna go away and create my own family, I can’t protect you like this anymore. So it’s your decision if you want to handle him alone’. And for her it was the moment when she decided to divorce.
Dana Knight: Nowadays we’re more exposed to footage of domestic violence, what comes to mind is the evidence in the famous divorce case of Amber Heard & Johnny Depp. But in your film there are only gestures or grimaces that point to a darker reality, the violence is not captured directly, we can only imagine it. Your grandmother had the mentality that she is supposed to endure it so I assume that even if she could, your grandmother would not have dared to film those moments…
Annika Mayer: No, she would have not, she thought it’s not her place to document it… She always said, ‘I’m a very simple woman, why would anyone be interested in my story?’. It’s very typical of women of her generation to identify themselves completely with the domestic space, to be there to care for their man and to deny their own individuality, to not be a person of their own. But my grandma is very outspoken, for me she is super strong. And I think that’s exactly what got her into trouble with my granddad, that she wouldn’t shut up.
When I was little, she was living alone, for me she was always this strong woman. But at the same time, she married twice again after her divorce from my grandad, because she always felt that a woman needed a man by her side to be whole. We had this whole discussion where I was telling her, ‘No, you don’t need a man’. And she would be, ‘Yes, you’re not complete without the other’. So she still has very much internalised this idea of a woman being inferior to a man.
But she’s also willing to accept the fact that for instance I live differently and that I’m happy this way. She can’t fully understand why I do this but she believes me, she believes that I don’t need a man to be happy, that I’m doing my stuff and that my thinking is different.
Dana Knight: How was this process for your father?
Annika Mayer: For my father it was very difficult because he had a lot of nightmares, a lot of things came up. I was the one who told him that he needs to look into it more deeply. But I also underestimated the trauma. In the end he learnt that if he spoke about it, nothing bad would come off it. It’s a way to process the whole thing.…but it has been tough.
When he restarted his life with my mum, he managed to push these dark feelings away but if you stir things up, everything comes up again.
With domestic violence, you really need these ‘excuses’ to speak about it. Excuses like making a film. And really engaging and asking questions… Of course we were talking about it in the family but not often. So a film like this makes you question things on a deeper level. It’s a good thing but very exhausting.
Dana Knight: Do you feel the making this film was somehow therapeutic for your family?
Annika Mayer: In a way. But a film cannot change things, I feel that sometimes we have too high expectations about what a film can do. But it was a start. But I wouldn’t say the film was therapeutic in the sense that now everything is ok.
Dana Knight: At the end of the film, there are some horrendous statistics: “Every 3rd day in Germany a woman is killed by a partner or ex-partner”. That’s a lot of women.What is the source of these statistics?
Annika Mayer: It’s police reports. Every year there is a report on partner violence from the last year.
Yes, there is still a lot of domestic and partner violence. If you look at the statistics for partner violence, it’s way higher. This is really shocking, it’s still so prevalent. So I put that statistic there because I didn’t want people to leave the cinema and think, ‘OK, so this was after the war, men came back traumatised and the violence showed up within the home but now it’s way better”. Of course the context matters and the war definitely played a role. But it’s more the context than the reason. So if domestic violence is still happening it means there is a reason for it and that has to do with our patriarchal society. That’s why things don’t change.
Dana Knight: That’s shocking because the media almost stopped talking about it.
Annika Mayer: Exactly. That’s a really sad thing in Germany. Spain for instance has implemented a lot of measures regarding partner violence. They have created safe spaces, women’s housing, committees where you can make a complaint. Also measures against stalking, if there is a verdict, the man has to wear a monitor bracelet, a GPS ankle bracelet and the woman is warned if he gets near.
Spain implemented a lot of measures and the numbers went down. It’s not like you can’t do anything. Now they want to change things in Germany too. Germany signed the Istanbul convention that stipulates you have to provide a number of women’s housing per capita. But they don’t even fulfil the basics. They have to fight for the money which comes from women’s movements, they don’t get regular money from the state, they always have to renew contracts. We all think the matter is being taken care of but it’s not.
Dana Knight: Is Spain the most advance country in Europe when it comes to tackling domestic violence?
Annika Mayer:I think so but I’m not 100% sure. I know that Spain had huge numbers and they got them down.
Dana Knight: The pay gap is also an issue in Germany. When I fist moved to Berlin I came across some statistics showing that in Germany women earn a lot less for the same job compared to men, compared to other countries in Europe. I did not expect this of Germany, I was shocked!
Annika Mayer: (laughing) Yeah, that’s true.
Dana Knight: I think there is a connection between the two issues, patriarchy is still very strong in Germany or maybe there aren’t enough activists and lobbying pushing for a change.
Annika Mayer:I think there are many activists but it’s a very slow process to implement the changes. And it was really sad to see how quickly West Germany after the war went into this conservative patriarchal society and I am still wondering why.
In East Germany it was different, women were working, had jobs but there was another issue there, the fact that they also took care of children and house chores on top of it, so things were still not equal. And they had more abortion rights. After reunification, with abortion laws and everything, they chose to stick to the West Germany model, which was way more conservative. There was a regression for women’s rights.
Dana Knight: We are living through a backlash, with abortion rights being taken away from women in certain parts of the world …
Annika Mayer: This is something I am really afraid of. Movements always come in waves, there is some progress, then a backlash, then more progress. But with the right wing, and the hateful and aggressive mentality towards women, I am afraid we could lose a lot of our rights, that women before us fought for. It feels like now we have to fight to keep what previous generations of women achieved for us. Which is kind of weird. There are still movements but it’s going too slow.
Dana Knight:You put the film together very artfully, you created an immersive atmosphere, you took us on a journey. What was your process in terms of sound designand other formal aspects?
Annika Mayer: I had a very good collaboration with the sound designer, we wanted to have these elements, water, glass, and Gaston, the sound designer, started working with them. We sometimes created the music out of sound design. Then we talked about how to have people immersed into a scene. It’s also a film about memory and your memory isn’t always 100% accurate so we wanted to have the sound design a little bit off, like you remember things but you’re not sure it’s 100% correct.
For me it was important not to have a soundtrack that puts you into a specific emotion. I wanted to create an open space where people can investigate the images and the story and see for themselves. If you put a story about partner violence in a dark space, people feel bad about it, and then that’s it. But I wanted to open the conversation, I wanted us all to look more closely and talk about it more openly so the sound design was key in achieving this.
There is also the concept that domestic violence is not visible in the public space normally. You can’t tell from pictures if a man is violent or not. Reports say it’s men in all positions, very influential, who can be violent at home so we really can’t know.
My question was how to make domestic violence more visible. So I looked at the images for clues, but there are only little clues. It’s only when my grandmother says, ‘Yeah, I saw it on his face again”, that’s very strong but we only know because she tells us that there is something in his eyes that she recognises.
Home Sweet Home is next showing at Achtung Berlin Film Festival in April, and at UNARCHIVE in Rome in May.
CINERRATICA 