The Trouble with Being Born (2020)

Somewhere in Central Europe, perhaps in the vicinity of Vienna, in the near future. Ten-year-old Elli is an android, as we soon learn. She takes shape through programming and this turns her into a fantasy figure. Firstly for a man she calls “Daddy” with whom she lies by the pool and for whom she dresses up in the house at the edge of the forest. Elli is the vessel for his memories, which mean nothing to her, but everything to him. One day he runs after a strange echo and gets lost in the darkness while Elli, who follows him, is picked up by strangers. A new identity awaits her, a new ghostly existence – as a blank screen onto which others can project their loss of the paradise that is childhood. Austria’s new voice for the nexus between desire and the abyss, fear and mystery, feeling and emptiness is Sandra Wollner. As in Das unmögliche Bild, in her provocative second feature film she develops the plot from a complex basic constellation (not the other way around) and reconstructs families that never existed. And so the machine becomes a mirror of human emotion, and the film a captivating ladder into virtual and psychological realities.