General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

The Trouble with Being Born

The Trouble with Being Born (German release title Vom Nachteil geboren zu sein) is a 2020 science fiction drama film directed by the Austrian filmmaker Sandra Wollner, in which a child-shaped android named Elli lives with a man she calls her father, carrying his memories of a daughter who disappeared years earlier.¹^•² An Austrian-German co-production of 94 minutes in the German language, it premiered in the Encounters section of the 70th Berlin International Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Prize, and it became one of the most debated festival films of 2020 after being withdrawn from the Melbourne International Film Festival.³^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Director and writers	Sandra Wollner; screenplay by Wollner and Roderick Warich¹
Production	Austria/Germany, 2020, 94 minutes, German language; produced by Panama Film with The Barricades, ZDF/Das kleine Fernsehspiel, and Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg¹^•⁵
Premise	Elli, an android in the body of a ten-year-old girl, lives with a man whose real daughter went missing ten years earlier; she is programmed with his memories, which mean everything to him and nothing to her⁴^•⁶
Second half	Elli is reprogrammed as Emil, a likeness of the brother of an elderly woman, Mrs Schikowa, who died 60 years earlier⁴
Principal awards	Encounters Special Jury Award at the Berlinale 2020; Austrian Film Award 2021 for Best Feature Film and Best Director; German Film Critics Award 2022 for Best Film and Best Cinematography³^•²¹
Controversy	Withdrawn from the 2020 Melbourne International Film Festival after two forensic psychologists publicly objected, citing possible normalization of sexual interest in children⁴
Critical reception	93% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 14 reviews; 5.4/10 on IMDb from about 1,600 user ratings⁷^•⁸

Spoilers

Plot and structure

The film opens as a summer idyll. Elli, played by Lena Watson, drifts through the days with Georg (Dominik Warta) at an isolated house in the forest: they swim in the pool, and at night he takes her to bed.¹^•⁷ Elli is not a child but an android, built to resemble the man's daughter, who went missing ten years earlier; she repeats his memories and his words, which mean everything to him and nothing to her.⁴^•⁶ The relationship is presented with implied physical and pseudo-incestuous overtones, though no sexual activity is depicted on screen.⁹

The turn. One night Elli sets off into the woods, following a fading echo, and is found by a man who gives her to his elderly mother, Mrs Schikowa (Ingrid Burkhard).⁴^•⁷ Elli is reprogrammed as Emil, a likeness of Schikowa's brother, who died 60 years earlier. Reminders of her previous existence as Elli surface, Emil's identity and memory become entangled, and the android becomes increasingly unpredictable, leading to the film's tragic climax.⁴

The Australian classification record describes the second half as Elli beginning a new life as a companion to an elderly woman called Anna, remodelled after her younger brother Emil, who died when they were children.⁹ Both owners are portrayed as trapped in grief and guilt: the father keeps himself frozen at the moment of his daughter's disappearance, while Schikowa attempts to revisit and repair her childhood experiences with her brother.⁴

Themes and interpretation

The film's stated concerns are memory, identity, and grief. Wollner has described memory as "the narrative that provides meaning and identity, without which we would sink into meaningless chaos," and set against this the endlessness of a machine's existence, whose narration cannot be immediately comprehended.¹⁰ The title refers to the 1973 work of philosophy of the same name by the Romanian-born writer Emil Cioran.¹¹

Wollner called the film a kind of "Anti-Pinocchio": where Steven Spielberg's A.I. and the Pinocchio myth tell the story of a machine becoming human, her android moves in the opposite direction.¹²^•¹³ Critics have read it in the tradition of the director's Austrian compatriots Michael Haneke and Ulrich Seidl, films that confront and polarize without sensationalism.¹⁴^•¹⁵ The psychiatrist Izaak Lim, reviewing the film in the BJPsych Bulletin, described it as a techno-dystopian parable that warns of the consequences of humanity's attempts to technologically circumvent the ordinary vicissitudes of life, rather than an endorsement of the relationship it depicts.⁴ In academic commentary, Annie Ring of University College London has read the film as a case of a biomachine more vulnerable than the humans around her, whose simulation of human life serves her owner's transhumanist aspirations.¹¹

Production

The idea for the film came originally from co-writer Roderick Warich.¹⁶ Shooting ran from 10 September to 23 November 2018 in Lower Austria and Vienna.¹⁷ The film was Wollner's graduation film at the Film Academy Baden-Württemberg.²

Protecting the performer. The child actor's identity was concealed: Lena Watson is a pseudonym, and the actor's face was rendered unrecognizable through a silicone mask made by the make-up artist Gaby Grünwald, with CGI used to simulate nudity.¹⁶^•¹⁸ Wollner stated that the production held extensive conversations with the actor's parents, who accompanied every step of the shoot.¹⁶

Reception and controversy

At its Berlinale premiere in the new Encounters section, devoted to aesthetically and structurally daring works, the film won the Encounters Special Jury Award.³^•¹³^•²¹ The Hollywood Reporter called it possibly the most daring and divisive film of that festival.¹³

The Melbourne International Film Festival withdrew the film from its 2020 program after two forensic psychologists publicly opposed its inclusion, citing concerns that it might normalize sexual interest in children and be used as a source of arousal by audiences interested in child abuse material; the episode reignited a national debate in Australia about film censorship.⁴^•⁸ Wollner later noted that none of the people who had made public comments or contacted her with concerns and threats had seen the film.¹⁹ The Australian Classification Board subsequently rated the film R 18+ for high impact themes, noting that no actual sexual activity is depicted.⁹

Some critics pushed back on reducing the film to its most inflammatory element. Christos Tsiolkas wrote in The Saturday Paper that to reduce the film to being about pedophilia is to seriously misrepresent it, and that Wollner asks viewers to consider the moral consequences of the future world being constructed.⁷ Jonathan Romney, writing in Screen International, found more at issue than provocation, describing a complex film that delves into questions of memory, gender, identity, and film language.⁷

The film collected a substantial run of awards in the German-speaking world: the Diagonale Grand Prize for Best Feature Film and an acting award for Dominik Warta in 2020, the Romy for Best Film, the Austrian Film Award 2021 for Best Feature Film, Best Director, Best Sound Design, and Best Hair and Make-up, the German Critics Association Award for Best Feature and Best Camera, and the German Film Critics Award 2022 for Best Film and Best Cinematography (Timm Kröger).³ It also won the Méliès d'argent for the best European fantastic feature at the Trieste Science+Fiction Festival.³

The director

Sandra Wollner was born in 1983 in Styria, Austria.² Her first feature, The Impossible Picture (Das unmögliche Bild, 2016), received the German Film Critics' Award in 2019.² The Trouble with Being Born is her second feature; her third, Everytime, premiered at Cannes in 2026.²⁰

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026