With filmmaker Moritz Riesewieck in person

The German Film Office is pleased to present a free screening of Eternal You, Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck’s moving documentary on a troubling new use of AI: reanimating the dead. Q&A with Riesewieck to follow. Please register to attend.

As the 2020s become defined by the rapid integration of artificial intelligence into our personal and working lives, some startups are using it to create avatars of the deceased. Eternal You explores this strange technological frontier and the complex emotions, motivations, and hopes of those pioneering it.

From the users of services like Project December and HereAfter AI—like Joshua, who spends day and night chatting with a simulation of his partner, or Ji-sung, who joins a reality TV show to meet an avatar of her 7-year-old daughter—to the developers who deny responsibility for the psychological consequences of their products, Eternal You probes the relationship between the living, the dead, and the uncanny in-between. “Rigorous and informative... [Eternal You] muses on the abiding question of how we cope with loss.” —David Katz, Cineuropa, 04/25/2024.

Eternal You world premiered in the World Cinema Documentary Competition at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, before screening at DOC NYC, Hot Docs, and the San Francisco International Film Festival.

Eternal You
Dirs. Hans Block, Moritz Riesewieck
Germany/United States, 2024
87 min.
With Joshua Barbeau, Christi Angel, Jang Ji-sung, Stephenie Oney

Moritz Riesewieck is a German essay author, scriptwriter, theater and film director. He studied directing at Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin and some semesters of economics as a fellow of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. His research, together with Hans Block, about freedom of expression in the age of social media brought them international attention. Their debut film The Cleaners celebrated its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in 2018 and has since been screened at more than 70 international film festivals, in cinemas, and on TV worldwide. It was nominated for an Emmy and the German Television Award and received numerous international awards, including the Prix Europa for Best European TV Documentary in 2018 and the Grimme Audience Award in 2019. Riesewieck’s essay “Digital Dirt Work” was published by dtv in 2017.