One of the discoveries of this year’s Cannes Film Festival was the Un Certain Regard selected (should have been in competition for the Palme) Everytime, the latest feature from Austrian filmmaker Sandra Wollner would go onto win Un Certain Regard Prize. Best known for her provocative and unsettling The Trouble with Being Born, Wollner returns with a film that feels at once more intimate and emotionally accessible while remaining every bit as formally daring. Everytime is a work that throws its audience into catastrophe almost immediately, refusing the comforts of gradual exposition as it follows a family navigating the aftermath of unimaginable loss.
Part grief study, part psychological mystery, and part metaphysical inquiry, Everytime explores how absence reshapes perception itself. Memory, emotional displacement, and the fragile performances that allow people to continue living after tragedy become central concerns as Wollner blurs the boundaries between reality, recollection, and imagination. Through thesp Birgit Minichmayr, Ella’s fractured experience of mourning, ordinary spaces become uncanny, relationships become layered with uncertainty, and grief emerges not as a singular event but as an altered way of seeing the world.
Following the film’s world premiere, I sat down with Sandra Wollner to discuss the film’s abrupt structural choices, its visual language of grief, the role of ambiguity in its central relationships, and how Everytime extends this fascination with memory, absence, and the unsettling spaces between reality and perception.
