This science-fiction feature about an android was the film director Sandra Wollner submitted for her final exam at the film academy in Ludwigsburg, Germany. With it she explores the questions of man and machine, of who and what rules decision-making in today’s world.
Elli is the android living with a man she calls her father: Georg. He built her to replicate his young daughter who disappeared a long time ago. Since she was created by him, she is programmed to make him happy and serve his pleasure. That includes her being his sex robot. They drift through the summer together, swimming in the pool during the day, sharing his bed at night. He loves her deeply, trying to forget that she is no more than a figment of his imagination. She is his memory and recalls scenes from his lost daughter’s childhood. They mean nothing to her and everything to him. But Elli is a sophisticated machine, and one night she just takes off, following a fading echo into the woods. On her journey she, at times, turns into a boy, Emil, who died decades ago in the war. And then the copy runs into her real, original life. 
At its international premiere, the film was compared to Black Mirror and the director concurs: “I don’t think technology makes the problem worse, because I think it’s something that was always there. I didn’t want to make a dystopia about how technology is going to bring out the worst in us, or how it is going to rescue us—this idea of technology being the evil or the good part—but more about how it’s always a mirror for our inner, darkest, weirdest thoughts. The dystopian odyssey stars Lena Watson as Elli and Dominik Warta as Georg. The Trouble With Being Born premiered last February at the Berlin Film Festival where it won a special jury award.