The Trouble with Being Born(GFF 2025)

Austria, Germany / 2020

2020
Encouters Award – Special Jury Prize, Berlinale

2021
Best Film, Best Cinematography, German Film Critics Association Awards

2021
Best Feature Film, Best Director, Best Makeup, Austrian Film Award

In the near future, ten-year-old android Elli drifts through shifting identities, built to embody memories, desires, and losses that are not her own. Programmed as the perfect child, she moves like a ghost between families, becoming at once a vessel for longing and a mirror of hidden fears and forbidden intimacy. With unsettling atmosphere and hypnotic precision, Sandra Wollner’s provocative second feature blurs the boundaries between memory and code, family and fabrication, offering a haunting meditation on loneliness, desire, and the uncanny ways we seek to keep the past alive.