Director's Note

I am thrilled to present Umlaut, a project I have been working on for countless hours over the past four years, together with screenwriters Roberto Winter and Guilherme Peters, concept artist Pedro Adario and sound editor Edson Secco.

As you will see in this presentation, as well as the concept art accessible in the last page, together we are in the process of creating a fully fleshed out sci-fi universe which will at the same time contain and amplify our story. Growing up in Brazil, since my early teenage years I have always been marveled by the expansive world-building present in American sci fi novels, which I would consume voraciously as soon as their cheap paperback versions arrived in our local newspaper stands. Ray Bradbury, Margaret Atwood, Jeff VanderMeer and so many others have all made me intensely desire to inhabit their worlds, at the same time as they have given me very deep questions to think about, and I would say that my desire to make films is forever an attempt to link these two things, world-building to metaphysical questioning. This brings us to Umlaut.

In Umlaut the central metaphysical question is what makes human consciousness irredeemably linked to our capacity to tell stories, and how to endow computers with the promethean-fire of storytelling may be a double-edged sword that will determine the future of our species.

In the film Theodore, Doron and Ted stand for the evolution of machine learning, and cracking Sophie’s story is the ultimate barrier separating this entity and its objective – to attain consciousness. With all its flaws and limitations, our protagonist Sophie is convinced by the end of the film that she needs to support this barrier with all her strength. She understands that empathy is what redeems us as human beings, and is willing to sacrifice everything in a dogged fight against the AI so as to not partake with the knowledge she holds without infusing it with this core tenet – love.

Similarly, I possess a deep personal conviction that meaningful philosophical discussion – in this case one around what makes us human and how would we pass that on to machines – can be infused in broad, plot-driven, commercial films, where fully fleshed out characters are able to transform, through their actions and emotions, complex concepts into dramatic truths universally accessible to a wide audience.

Most of the films I have admired throughout my life have been able to accomplish this dramatic transformation of concept into plot, be it Wachowski’s Matrix with its discussion of what makes something real, or Kubricks’s 2001 ponderations on the nature of intelligence, and with Umlaut I intend to use this same tool on the central themes and speculation of our current worldview.