Why the desk picked it
Burt and Ethelle Shatz have been married for more than 70 years. The day they met, at a student co-op in Cleveland, was never photographed or filmed. As Burt's memory fades, Ethelle works with their family, clinical experts and Google DeepMind engineers to rebuild that moment from restored photographs and her own account of it.
Liz Garbus directs, with Dan Cogan and Darren Aronofsky producing, and the film was an official selection at Telluride this year. It is as interested in the care around the technology as in the technology itself: reminiscence therapy, memory loss, and how much of a family's past a machine should be trusted to interpret.
For AI filmmakers, it is a working model for generating real people. The subjects shape the scene, and the payoff is Burt's smile when he finally watches it, not the render.