Wollner's 'Everytime' Wins Un Certain Regard Top Prize
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- Sandra Wollner's third feature "Everytime" won the top prize in Cannes's Un Certain Regard program, the review calling it the most refined and inventive formal statement in that lineup
- The film follows a Berlin family — single mother Ella, younger sister Melli — grieving the death of teenager Jessie, who falls from a high-rise rooftop in Tenerife on the eve of a family vacation
- Birgit Minichmayr ("Everyone Else") anchors the film's middle section as Ella, with Carla Hüttermann as Jessie and Lotte Shirin Keiling as Melli, who processes grief through texting her dead sister's phone and an 8-bit video game the film itself enters for extended interludes
- Cinematographer Gregory Oke — whose prior credits include "Aftersun" — lenses the film, with the review praising the collaboration's soul-bleaching coastal light and creeping dread
- The review draws stylistic comparison to German auteur Angela Schanelec's semi-surreal walking-and-talking features during the film's opening night with Jessie's boyfriend Lux
- Wollner's prior film, 2020's "The Trouble With Being Born" — about a childlike AI android sexually abused by its creator — saw its distribution curtailed by both its controversial premise and the pandemic; the reviewer expects "Everytime" to see "more theatrical play" by comparison
- While praising the film's audacious final third, the reviewer flags a flaw: Wollner over-complicates the finale with one too many dimension-tilting story elements, including a sudden voiceover the film "would lose no power by shedding"
Why it matters: A top Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes is a meaningful career accelerant — it virtually guarantees "Everytime" wider arthouse distribution than Wollner's pandemic-curtailed, thematically confrontational "The Trouble With Being Born," and pairs her with a buzzy "Aftersun" DP. For a 30-something Austrian filmmaker with only three features, this positions her as a major European auteur in the making rather than a one-film provocateur.
