Everytime
In Search of Reality
As a child, Sandra Wollner had an encounter with death. This experience shaped her view of perception and as a result, her subsequent career as a director: "I almost drowned back then, and I have a memory of it that comes from me alone, not from other people's stories. There was a fish that ate what I had vomited. But I don't know whether that really happened." This gave rise to questions which she began to explore when she was later given a Mini DV camera as a gift: "Which images that we are told about actually come from us?" The most recent result of this quest, the family drama "Everytime", has been creating waves of enthusiasm in the international film world for several months now. In Cannes, this "infinitely beguiling portrait of grief" (IndieWire) won the award for Best Film in the "Un Certain Regard" section. Since then, the Austrian-born director's film has been selected as Germany's entry for the Oscar in the International Feature Film category. In this deeply poetic exploration of the death of a girl who dies in an accident, we find some recurring themes that characterize Sandra Wollner's work – such as a confrontation with mortality: "Ultimately, the three films I have made so far are about the fact of transience." But she questions this fact by highlighting different perceptual perspectives. "We construct our personal reality because we spend so much time in our own heads, and I'm interested in how we might escape from this individual perspective." One key factor here is the use of child protagonists, as in "Everytime", where her young sister keeps the victim's memory alive using a range of means.
In Sandra Wollner's feature film debut, "Das unmögliche Bild" ("The Impossible Picture", 2017) – which received the German Film Critics' Association award for Best Film of the year – a 13-year-old captures her family's everyday life with a Super 8 camera – until even a dead person appears in the footage. "The Trouble With Being Born", on the other hand, which won the Austrian Film Award for Best Feature Film in 2021, tells the story of an android girl whose fate is tragically defined by the human protagonists and their memories.
It is no coincidence, therefore, that as an impression, Sandra Wollner's childhood memory of almost drowning found a way into "Das unmögliche Bild" ("The Impossible Picture"). "Perhaps I keep returning to the child's perspective because it lays no claim to an understanding of death. Children do not explain what the end of life 'means'; they show how incomprehensible it remains." The filmmaker is the mother of a daughter now several months old, and in her daughter, she notices an "immediate attention to things, a sense of wonder that the world even exists."
Originally, however, her path as a director did not seem to be leading towards this hyper-subjective aesthetic, but in the opposite direction. Among other things, she worked as an editor and director of short documentaries, and began studying documentary directing at the Film Academy Baden-Württemberg in 2012. "But I realised relatively quickly that although I'm interested in people and their realities, I was even keener to tell stories from my own perspective. I felt that I wasn't doing my protagonists full justice because I was constructing things around them more than drawing from their real lives." So, she began "experimenting with cinema as a formal medium."
Even though her last two films in particular have a clearly delineated "plot", she doesn't see herself as a traditional storyteller: "I think from the very beginning, I wasn't just interested in telling a story; I wanted to incorporate the medium itself. Film can do something that linear storytelling can't – for example, by making different times present simultaneously." The fact that her narrative style is currently causing such a stir “still amazes” her “a little”. She doesn't have any obvious explanations for this fact, only the following conjecture: "Perhaps our idea of how a story can work has changed as well. Today, we're far more used to conceiving of different realities simultaneously." The internet has reinforced this perception, she believes: "Parallel worlds, alternative biographies, and different versions of the same person have long since become part of the mainstream."
Thus, Sandra Wollner remains true to her own approach, which departs from a strictly rational portrayal of superficial reality. She is currently developing two stories. One of them is set "in prehistoric times and shows how spirits come into the world". The other depicts a dystopia. In her private life, however, she is currently craving everyday simplicity: "After this wild year, I need a short break and an opportunity to just observe the world."
Author: Rüdiger Sturm