EVERYTIME World Cinema

Screening to be followed by a conversation with director and screenwriter Sandra Wollner.

After her 2020 Berlin Encounters Special Jury Prize-winning feature THE TROUBLE WITH BEING BORN’s festival tour was truncated by the COVID pandemic, filmmaker Sandra Wollner returns unimpeded six years later with her third feature EVERYTIME, which won the top prize in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section. A quietly exceptional Birgit Minichmayr stars as Ella, a woman who becomes the emotional anchor for her daughter and daughter’s boyfriend in the wake of an unimaginable event as they try to navigate the aching absence that echoes everywhere they turn. To shake them out of the memories, home videos and video games they’ve withdrawn to to numb their pain, Ella alights on an impulsive trip to recreate the family vacation they previously abandoned. On the sunny beaches of Tenerife, each of the trio’s preferred retreat into the past begins to merge with the literal resort retreat to transform into a surreal new present around them. Wollner’s direction creates a world tinged with the languid magic of summer heat as Gregory Oke (AFTERSUN) establishes himself as the preeminent cinematographer for capturing the liminal hidden within summer holidays. Offering no easy explanations, EVERYTIME is a gentle exploration of grief that will similarly linger in your mind long after the tragedy is over. –Eli Prysant