EXCLUSIVE: Austrian filmmaker Sandra Wollner’s third feature Everytime world premieres in Cannes Un Certain Regard this year, and Deadline can reveal a clip setting-up the premise for the tale of a family coming to terms with a tragic loss.
On the eve of a family vacation, the eldest daughter sneaks out to see her boyfriend. After a night of partying, they climb a high-rise to watch the sunrise under the influence of pills in an escapade that will take a tragic turn.
A year later, the girl’s mother and younger sister are joined by the boyfriend in a trip to Tenerife for a family holiday that never happened. Under the glow of the sun, past and present quietly start to overlap as they struggle with blame and forgiveness.
Birgit Minichmayr (The White Ribbon, 3 Days in Quiberon, The Blood Countess) plays the mother, alongside the emerging young cast of Lotte Shirin Keiling, Tristan Lopez and Carla Hüttermann.
“I don’t believe in an afterlife, but I envy those who do. I do believe that the images of the people we love stay with us – that they somehow inscribe themselves into the world. Ever since my father died, whenever I come across a certain bend in the river, I can see him standing there, fiddling with his fishing rod. And for a brief instant it feels as if I could simply step into that image,” says Wollner in a director’s statement.
“I have met the kind of people like those in this film more than once in my life: the mother who lost her daughter, the boy who was there, the younger sister who has not yet found a way to process it. We watch them as they continue with everyday life, because they have no choice – homework, groceries, dinner – clinging to a fragile routine that barely masks an impossible wish: to somehow return to a place where none of this has happened.“
Everytime is Wollner’s third feature after The Impossible Picture and The Trouble With Being Born, which played in the Berlinale’s the Encounters section, winning the special jury award.
The film is produced by Lixi Frank and David Bohun at Vienna-based Panama Film, Viktoria Stolpe at The Barricades, her Berlin-based company with Timm Kröger, Wollner, and Roderick Warich.
Charades is handling international sales.