Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck’s Eternal You, sold by Dogwoof and produced by Christian Beetz and Georg Tschurtschenthaler for German production outfit Beetz Brothers, comprises a sobering analysis of a thriving new online industry that offers grieving folk the possibility to communicate again with their deceased loved ones. Once upon a time the death industry dealt with your despatch six feet under. Now, in these digital times, it is your re-emergence from beyond the grave which is making the big bucks.
Is all of this science fiction? Not a bit of it. It is a new reality that is developing at death-defying pace. In their feature doc which is, in equal part, absorbing, mindboggling and deeply moving (and, at times, pretty spooky), the German filmmakers introduce us to a cast of folk with a vested interest in digital immortality.
We meet US designers/entrepreneurs Jason Rohrer and Justin Harrison who launched, respectively, the successful Project December and YOV systems which offer the possibility of post-death communication. Meanwhile in South Korea, Hyunsuk Lee (Vive Studio) created a virtual clone of a deceased 7-year-old, whom her grieving mother could talk to and ‘touch’. In New Zealand, Academy Award-winning Mark Sagar, who won the gongs for his work on Avatar and King Kong, has created a virtual copy of his own [living] child and explains how he believes that human consciousness is something that is replicable digitally.
Then there are the users. Joshua Barbeau spends days and nights communicating with a simulation of his deceased girlfriend Jessica. Christi Angel receives strange and borderline terrifying chat responses from her dead ex. South Korean Jang Ji-sung was plagued by guilt-ridden nightmares over the death of her daughter (see above) and so agrees to take part in a TV show to meet her again in AI. Stephenie Oney agrees to the creation of a voicebot clone of her dead father so that her great-grandchildren can still talk to him ‘in person’.
And then are the detractors, all of whom question the ethics of creating such opportunities for increasingly desperate folk. Technology journalist Sara M Watson questions the limited amount of data available to create the words and ‘thoughts’ of the dead subjects. “It’s a very limited understanding of who we are if it’s just these digital breadcrumbs of where we’ve been and what we’ve looked at and what we’ve clicked,” she comments.
Carl Öhman, a researcher on the afterlife industry, questions Mark Sagar’s attempts to replicate consciousness. “We don’t really know how brains work [or] how consciousness is produced, which is a very important step if you want to replicate it with a machine.”
Meanwhile, MIT professor Sherry Turkle makes the ominous observation that, “all of this is happening in a capitalist society where capitalism is trying to say, ‘we’re not only making a new market, we’re making new humans.’ Which diminishes us.”
Directors Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck began working on Eternal You in 2018, the same year that their The Cleaners was nominated for the Sundance World Cinema Doc Grand Jury Prize. The technology was in its relative infancy at that point but the pair followed developers and users alike during the first tentative years.
But the breakthrough year was 2023, they concede. “To be honest, when we thought ‘now we have it,’ that was at the end of last year,” comments Block. “We filmed so much in 2023 for the film because of ChatGPT, because of so many new developments. And there was one moment where we realized ‘now we have the stories we [have been] looking for over the last five years.’ And that was a fantastic feeling… And I’m so proud of me and Moritz that we didn’t finish the film two years earlier, because then the film wouldn’t be that good, that’s for sure.”
Riesewieck reflects on the sense of secular religiosity that the new technology engenders, and how he and Block were inspired by a phrase coined by Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács, that of ‘transcendental homelessness.’
“We believe that [phrase] fits because people need something they can believe in,” he says, citing the ‘black box’ properties of the AI which renders it “more powerful than any human can ever be.”
“So this narrative of something that we don’t actually fully understand, but that can have so much power above us – that is of course a narrative which can…make people, who normally think clearly, fall for it,” he continues. ”[People] don’t believe in God anymore…but at the same time, they can’t deal with the fact that death is finite…and these tech companies have a big chance to fill this gap.”
Block and Riesewieck shared directing duties 50/50, other than when simultaneous shoots were necessary. “It’s our policy really to do everything together,” says Block. “The editing, the filming, the interviewing, everything. And I think that’s also what makes the film maybe better than we would do it on our own because we have this constant partner at our side whom we can talk to and to make sure that we discuss if the way we are going is the right way.”
Since 2018, developments in AI have progressed at a remarkable pace, the filmmakers underline. “Yeah, definitely. It’s an exponential progress, and we were surprised even how quickly it went in the last years,” Riesewieck agrees, noting how user interaction with the death-comm tech has contributed greatly to its evolution.
“Now that it’s out there on the market, it’s progressing even faster. So the more we use it, the better it will be – the better it’ll be, the more people will use it. And this at a moment in time when more and more people are actually striving for companionship, because there is a big crisis of loneliness out there. People feel they don’t have a community anymore, so they need to compensate. And that is a moment when AI bots and avatars seem a pretty good offer to a lot of people out there to compensate for that loneliness. And when their belief system is not intact anymore, they really need new narratives.”
“So yeah, Hans and me, we are both super impressed by the progresses and the developments, but at the same time, we really feel like we should not let developers decide what our society wants and what is good for us humans, and what is not. Because if we just go with the flow and just use everything which is offered, we will then find ourselves becoming dehumanized super quickly.”
