Region: Styria
The K3 Film Festival reaches out to Styria for the first time.
Transported and supported by WESTBAHN.
Festivals and Awards
79th Festival de Cannes 2026 – Un Certain Regard Prize
Sarajevo Film Festival 2026 – Heart of Sarajevo for Best Narrative Feature Film
The last photo Jessie took shows the sun rising over Berlin. It hangs in the sky as if nothing had happened. But Ella has lost her daughter. All that remains is an absence that cannot be filled—and three people left to live with it: Jessie’s mother, Ella; her younger sister, Melli; and Lux, the boy everyone blames.
Unexpectedly, the three find themselves in Tenerife on a family holiday that never was. Beneath the blazing sun of the Canary Islands, memories and the present begin to blur. Why does the sun keep rising? You might think that after a tragedy like this, the world would have the decency to stop. It doesn’t.
Grief distorts time: it can stretch or compress it, consign whole stretches to a black hole of memory—or make time stop altogether. In EVERYTIME, memories and an unlived future intertwine in a dislocated reality where, in the face of the unimaginable, the unthinkable becomes possible.
Between intimacy and distance, guilt and forgiveness, stillness and movement, a new way of living on begins to take shape for Ella, Melli and Lux—one none of them planned, and one with no easy answers. The ghosts are everywhere.
EVERYTIME is a radically sensuous film about the impossibility of coming to terms with loss and the strange simultaneity of past, present and possible future. Sandra Wollner (THE TROUBLE WITH BEING BORN) pushes her style to a breathtaking new level. Cinematographer Gregory Oke (AFTERSUN) creates images of unsettling beauty: intimate yet distant, physical yet dreamlike; each shaft of light is at once a solace and a wound.
Interview with the director (excerpt)
At the beginning of EVERYTIME, a younger sister keeps complaining to her older sister that she always gets the short end of the stick—too little space, too little privacy. Did you reflect on the family as a system when you began writing the screenplay?
Sandra Wollner: In the opening scene, we are thrown into the everyday chaos of a family […]. I was interested in the chaos, in the way separate lives unfold alongside one another. Ella, Melli and Lux were there from the beginning. They are afterimages of people I have met, who inspired the film. But these afterimages took on a life of their own and became autonomous figures I followed.
The loss of a child—the abrupt end of a young life—could be seen as a connecting thread between your previous film, THE TROUBLE WITH BEING BORN, and EVERYTIME. What draws you to this subject?
Sandra Wollner: Childhood and death were already themes in my first film, THE IMPOSSIBLE PICTURE. Or, more specifically, a child’s perspective on death. That perspective draws me in and perhaps allows me a certain curiosity—or openness. […] Perhaps I keep returning to children because, like me, they have not yet fully grasped life. They see the world without prejudice or concepts that might hem in reality.
Director’s Biography
SANDRA WOLLNER (Director / Screenwriter)
Sandra Wollner, born in Styria, Austria, in 1983, studied documentary film directing at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg. Her feature debut, THE IMPOSSIBLE PICTURE (2016), won the New German Cinema Award and, in 2018, the German Film Critics’ Award for Best Feature Film. Her second feature, THE TROUBLE WITH BEING BORN, premiered in the Encounters section of the Berlinale in 2020 and received the Special Jury Prize. It went on to win four Austrian Film Awards, including Best Film and Best Director, as well as the German Film Critics’ Awards for Best Film and Best Cinematography. EVERYTIME is her third feature film. Wollner lives in Berlin.
