The Cannes Film Festival‘s Un Certain Regard section prides itself on showcasing discoveries of non-traditional cinema. What a fit for rising Austrian writer-director Sandra Wollner, who is making her Cannes debut in this year’s program with her third feature, Everytime!
Her debut feature, The Impossible Picture, showed the everyday life of a Viennese family in the 1950s as documented on 8mm film by 13-year-old Johanna, until the camera suddenly turns on her. Her sophomore movie, The Trouble With Being Born, was a drama about a 10-year-old android and her “Daddy.”
Now, Wollner is back with Everytime, which sees a tragic death bring a mother, her daughter, and a teenage boy, who everyone blames for the tragedy, together. The cinematic exploration of grief, blame and forgiveness takes the unlikely trio on a trip to Tenerife for “a family holiday that never happened,” as the auteur puts it. And under the glowing sun of the Spanish island, time, as well as reality and fiction, suddenly seem to start blurring.
If audiences, just like the writer of these lines, end up wondering “what the hell is going on!?,” Wollner is happy to hear it. “One experiences that feeling only rarely, and I really want to embrace that,” she tells THR. “I think it’s nice if you walk out of the cinema and you can’t completely grasp what you have just seen.”
