Reflections

When the lights came up, I was still trying to gather myself from the emotions left by the dance piece by Sasha Waltz. Susan Thieme tried to break the ice with a practical question to Pascal Trächslin: What is it to be a producer? At first sight, it was a very simple question, effective to break the ice and provide a gentle introduction to the film industry for our audience, which, besides the festival and the “Beyond Research Communication” course team, consisted of young secondary school pupils.

As Pascal explained, the production of the film took five years, not counting the time the director, Valerio Jalongo, had been developing the ideas in his mind. While the director is usually the creative head of a film, the producer is the one who supports the director’s vision and brings it to the cinema screen. The producer is also responsible for finding the financial resources that make a film possible.

Gradually, the conversation developed into deeper dimensions of AI. Thieme asked whether the producer’s opinions about AI had changed during the making of the film. He responded that his perspective, like ours, is constantly evolving, just as artificial intelligence itself keeps transforming day after day. He mentioned that one of the director’s fears was that, by the time the film was released, its topic might already have become outdated, a revealing comment about the pace at which AI evolves, and how difficult it is for cinema to capture a moving target.

Featuring the Human Brain Projet (HBP), Jalongo argues for a film in which AI is not only an artificial technology but also a window onto human mystery. Moving from a dance piece by Sasha Waltz, to a worldwide drone competition, to Refik Anadol’s Living Paintings artwork. The film sheds light on artists and scientist who share a dream of building a truly open, transparent AI and working together for a better humanity. The director therefore proposes referring to artificial intelligence as collective intelligence (Director’s notes, 2025). Yet, while this vision feels sincere, actual debates about AI raise new ethical questions.

Throughout the film, we are guided by a feminine voice embodying the point of view of an AI. I recall a scene involving a conversation between Ameca, a humanoid robot with female features, and Adam, an engineer. He asks Ameca: Can you feel emotions? What does it mean for you to feel?. While machines are incapable of experiencing emotions, they seem to understand their functions and inhabit them by mimicking emotional expression. Yet as the robots in the film are given human traits, such as the voice and facial expressions, more and more questions are being raised about the anthropomorphizing of AI, where human-like traits are attributed to systems that do not possess them, which distort AI capabilities and performance. Studies show that people often prefer female voices, and that makes us more predisposed to trusting them (West et al., 2019:99). Though these systems lack physical forms, they are made to embody a competent, dependable and efficient women. This tendency reinforces human biases and stereotypes and dangerously obscures how the technology truly operates.

This filmic choice highlights a growing question: What agency and rights do we accord to robots? It challenges the audience to think, or at least to try, from the perspective of robots. While I find this filmic choice intriguing, I found myself wishing for a more sustained critical reflection on the risks and implications of humanizing AI. By adopting a perspective that encourages the audience to empathize with robots, the film touches on but does not fully confront the dangers of anthropomorphism, especially how it can blur the boundary between simulation and sentience. A deeper engagement with these issues would have enriched the narrative and offered more insight into the growing fascination and fear surrounding AI.

When the conversation opened to the public, the discussion alternated between short questions and answers about the insights of the filmmaking process. Then, a class teacher raised a question that strongly resonated with me. Introducing himself as someone from a non-Western cultural background, he observed that the film’s narrative felt linear and marked by whiteness, addressing primarily Western audiences. As someone with origins in the Global South, in Southeast Asia, I recognized myself in this spectator’s observations.

Trächslin acknowledged the remark, agreeing that the development of AI, and by extension, the film, is a reflection of our societies, which are deeply westernized and influenced by whiteness. At this point, I saw a strong connection with my own field of study, geography: the geopolitics of resource extraction, the hidden labor sustaining data governance, and the physical infrastructures of data centers all converge within the same systems that enable AI. This spectator’s observation, therefore, invited me to think wider than the screen, to recognize the infrastructures, bodies, and ecologies that sustain both cinema and AI.

The discussion ended with an anecdote from the filming process. The producer shared that one scene, ultimately excluded from the final cut, showed a human drone pilot defeating an AI-driven drone in competition. “There were moments when humans were smarter than machines,” he said with a smile. They decided to leave the scene out, perhaps to maintain a certain ambiguity about AI’s dominance. This anecdote offered a poetic closure to the discussion, a reminder that, despite all technological advances, human creativity and unpredictability still have their place.