In a film EVERYTIME by Sandra Wollner, which will be screened in Competition Programme – Narrative Feature Film, a grieving mother embarks on a long-postponed vacation in the aftermath of a tragedy, exploring the unexpected relationships that emerge from shared grief.
Throughout her career, Austrian director Sandra Woller has been continuously coming back to the themes of memory and the passage of time. In her new film, Everytime, Wollner brings a story about Ella, a mother who has tragically lost her teenage daughter Jessie just days before their family vacation. A year later, Ella reunites with Lux, Jessie’s boyfriend, who becomes increasingly involved in the lives of both Ella and her younger daughter Melli as they each struggle with grief and guilt. By exploring the complex aftermath of loss and the different ways in which it shapes those who remain, Wollner creates a deeply intimate story that is both beautiful and haunting.
Everytime follows a grieving mother, her younger daughter, and the boyfriend of her late eldest daughter after a terrible tragedy. Where did the initial idea for the story come from?
The first image I had in mind was of a mother lying on a couch and hearing, or imagining, her dead child coming back. It wasn’t like a clear supernatural event, but more as something that comes from grief itself, from a wish so strong that it somehow begins to manifest itself.
From there, I started to think about the people left behind after such a tragedy: the mother, the younger sister, the boy who was there. People who are connected by something unbearable, not by choice. I was interested in what happens when grief does not get „managed“ and disappear, but instead starts to reorganize reality around itself.
Jessie’s death is shown in a haunting, yet visually beautiful way. When portraying tragedies on screen, what considerations guide your approach to the audience and to representing death?
We see them both from a distance where we already fear that something is about to happen. It’s like the world itself is looking, from so far away that it can’t or won’t interfere, but at the same time it feels so close as if it can observe a very intimate moment.
And then the perspective shifts… And after everything happened, the camera just goes on and searches for the next interesting bit, for something alive maybe, and finds a blinking traffic light, an empty crossroad and the sun rising. Representing death also means respecting what cannot really be represented. I think the horror is not only in the event itself, but in the fact that the world does not stop for it.
Grief and guilt are such complex emotions, and they are both the focal point of the film, affecting the characters in very different ways. During the writing process, what intrigued you the most about the intertwining of these two emotions?
I was interested in the way grief and guilt contaminate each other. Grief is rarely „clean“. It comes with anger, projection, shame, irrational wishes. And guilt, especially when it cannot be clearly assigned, becomes almost ghostly. Lux carries a guilt that may not belong to him in any simple way, but it still shapes him. Ella knows this, and yet she is drawn to him, because he is connected to the last moments of her daughter’s life. People sometimes asked why Ella is not angrier. I am very sure that there was a time when she was angry and in so much pain that she could not get up and needed a lot of help. But she had to get up, there was another kid to take care of, she could not get absorbed by her grief and anger. We don’t see that time, we only see some black between the death and one year later.
Looking at your filmography, both The Impossible Pictures and The Trouble with Being Born explore memory, and Everytime seems to continue that interest. Would you say memory and the passage of time are recurring fascinations in your work?
Yes, I think all three films exist in a similar cosmos. In The Impossible Picture, I was interested in how a memory becomes a memory, how something subjective, unstable, perhaps even false, can turn into a form of truth. In The Trouble with Being Born, there is a machine that becomes a vessel for human projections, memories and desires. And in Everytime, again, the inner world and the outer world begin to overlap. I think I keep returning to this because we never encounter reality in a pure form. We are always interpreting it, projecting onto it, filling it with ghosts. Cinema is a testament to it. Memory is not only about the past. I feel it’s something that continues to act on the present.
Lotte Keiling, who plays Melli, is quite young. How do you help child actors develop a complex character while also tackling emotionally difficult material?
Lotte is an amazing person, witty, bright, and very much someone with her own opinions. She was clearly raised by loving parents, who encouraged her to think independently. The film lives much more from the absence of someone than from constantly performed grief, so there were also many lighter, more open scenes for Melli. She is not only a grieving child; she is still a child, with curiosity, humor, and energy. But for example, we approached the subject of grief together with her and the other children in a very concrete way. I asked them whether they had ever experienced the death of a pet, and that became the basis for the scene in Tropical Islands.
When you cast a child, you are also casting the family, because you need their support, their work, and their love. In this case we were especially lucky because Lotte’s parents are actors as well. They understood very well what the work required, but they never tried to control it. We also had the wonderful support of Juli Neuhaus, our kids’ coach, who is a director herself. I have worked quite a lot with children before, so I felt confident, but I was very grateful that we had such a strong support system around Lotte.
The director of photography Gregory Oke also shot Aftersun, a film that likewise explored the themes of memory, grief and family relationships. Did his work on Aftersun influence your decision to work with him? How did Oke help shape the visual language of the film?
Yes, I had seen Aftersun and I was completely struck by it. But it was not simply a question of thinking: this is a beautifully shot film, so I want to work with this person. What interested me was that I felt a certain attitude behind the camera, a way of looking at people, at distance, at memory, at what an image can hold back. That felt very close to something I was searching for. Then Gregory and I met, and it became clear quite quickly that we cared about similar things. I would never work with someone blindly just because they made a great film. What mattered was the conversation, and the sense that we could question the film together. Gregory is a writer and director himself, so our work was rarely only about where to place the camera. At the same time, I already had some of the visual ideas quite clearly in my head while writing, especially the use of this very long lens and zooms, this slightly forbidden feeling of observing people from far away while somehow being strangely close to them.
Everytime includes sequences of family photographs and home videos, as well as Minecraft-like sequences. Why was it important bring together these two very different visual forms, and how do they differ from and complement each other within the story?
For me, they are not as different as they may seem. Both are places where the dead can continue to exist in some form. Family photos and home videos are obvious containers of memory, but they are also strange, because they preserve people without really preserving them. What I mean by that is that maybe a gesture, or a face remains, but the person is gone – it’s somehow hollow, relying on you to fill in the rest. The game is more artificial, but it becomes another kind of memory space. Jessie used to play it, and now Melli enters that world after her. It has its own landscapes, rules and survival mechanics, and because it is so clearly constructed, it can become strangely metaphysical. I liked the idea that a digital, almost naive world could become so haunted, not because it is magical, but because it is so shaped by the absence of its creator.
