1-2 Special has acquired all North American rights to Austrian auteur Sandra Wollner’s Everytime, which won the top prize in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival.

Featuring cinematography from Aftersun DP Gregory Oke, the film follows a mother, her young daughter, and a teenage boy who, united by grief following a tragedy, embark on a trip to the Canary Islands for a family holiday that never happened. Suddenly, past and present, and fiction and reality, begin to quietly blur.

The film stars Birgit Minichmayr (Everyone Else, The White Ribbon, The Blood Countess), as well as  Lotte Shirin Keiling, Tristan Lopez and Carla Hüttermann. 

Everytime is Wollner’s third feature film. Her debut, The Impossible Picture was awarded the best film honor by the German Film Critics Association Award and the Ingmar Bergman International Debut Award at the Göteborg Film Festival. Her second feature, The Trouble With Being Born, premiered at the 2020 Berlin Film Festival, where it won the special jury prize in the Encounters section.

Everytime was produced by Lixi Frank and David Bohun of Panama Film, alongside Viktoria Stolpe of The Barricades. Charades is handling international sales.

In an interview before the film’s premiere, Wollner told The Hollywood Reporter about the inspiration for the movie: “Why does the sun go on shining? One would think that after a tragedy like the one that happens in the film, the world ought to have the decency to stop. … The indifference of the universe, which doesn’t care about our pain — that’s what interested me.”

THR‘s review called Everytime, “an intriguingly understated grief drama,” highlighting that “its giant twist of an ending leaves us with something to contemplate.” And it noted: “As a portrait of human behavior in the wake of a terrible loss, the film feels both studied and compassionate, revealing how everyone tries their best to move on but can never quite get [the grief] out of their minds.”

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