A look at digital immortality and the ethical problems associated with it, which will likely affect everyone.
The Cleaners, Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck’s first film, about the difficult work of user content moderators, won a ton of awards at film festivals, including the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. This time two of Germany’s most successful young directors explore one of the twilight zones of the digital world, startups that offer to «resurrect» the dead, which have appeared thanks to the development of AI. All you need to do is feed in the deceased’s posts, letters, videos, and voicemails and the result is a chatbot that communicates like the person or a rather lifelike avatar. What next? The «resurrected» person may begin to behave in frightening ways, as happened to Christy, one of the characters in the film. The bot created based on her dead lover’s personality stated that he was in hell but would come to visit her. Or, communicating with a person who is no longer here can become an addiction rather than a distraction, as happened to Joshua, another character, who did not leave his apartment for a month while he was writing to his dead girlfriend.
Eternal You outlines the ethical and psychological problems connected with technology. The filmmakers allocated the same amount of time to the founders of «digital immortality» companies (they turned out to be mainly cynical techno-optimists), their users, and also critics who were worried that technology in league with business was attempting to reformat questions of life and death. The authors suggest that viewers come to their own conclusions, but one thing is clear: the reality of the «living dead» is expanding fast and we need to think now about how our information footprint is managed so that relatives and friends, or strangers, do not «resurrect» us, even with the best of intentions.
The film will be screened in English with Russian subtitles.
Eternal You
Directors Hans Block, Moritz Riesewieck
Germany, 2024. 87 min. 18+