“Everytime”, Interview with director Sandra Wollner

Austrian filmmaker Sandra Wollner makes her Cannes debut with “Everytime“, her third feature, screening in Un Certain Regard at the 79th Festival de Cannes. After “The Impossible Picture” and “The Trouble With Being Born“, which won the Special Jury Award in the Berlinale’s Encounters section, Sandra Wollner turns her gaze to a Berlin family shattered by the death of a teenage daughter. A year after the tragedy, the girl’s mother Ella, played by Birgit Minichmayr, and her younger sister Melli set off for a holiday in Tenerife together with Lux, the boyfriend the whole world blames for the loss. Under a sun that refuses to set, past and present quietly begin to overlap.

People, ghosts

The characters in “Everytime“, Sandra Wollner explains, did not come from a single source. They are after images of people she has met at different points in her life, figures that became ghosts. What interested her was not the immediate aftermath of tragedy but what comes later. “We don’t see the period where she probably couldn’t get out of bed or stop crying, but rather the time where she has to get out of bed, go on, and organize her life. She talks about what is for dinner with her younger daughter even though they are now at the graveyard and one person is missing“. Sandra Wollner was drawn to those banal scenes where absence is felt most acutely, moments she describes as tender and brutal at the same time.

The split second of forgetting

There is a particular kind of grief the film captures: the instant when you wake up and forget, for a few seconds, that someone is gone. Sandra Wollner recognises that fleeting moment as something central to the experience. “You forget it for a split second and there is this tiny moment where it’s possible to call or get in contact with the person again because you have forgotten“.

The sun should stand still

The film’s most striking gesture, a sun that finally stops moving, has its roots in an earlier, unfinished project called “People in the Sun”, set in a world of perpetual daylight. That idea migrated into “Everytime” and found its meaning through a song: “The End of the World” by Skeeter Davis, which asks why the sun goes on shining when the pain is unbearable. “If you experience the biggest loss imaginable, like losing a child, the sun should have the decency to stand still. The world should not turn around anymore, but instead, the sun hangs there, obnoxious, naive, still shining as if nothing has changed, which is a tragedy in itself“.

Plot