Austrian director Sandra Wollner’s Everytime has found its North American home less than two weeks after claiming the top prize at Cannes. New York distributor 1-2 Special has acquired all North American rights to the film, which took the Un Certain Regard grand prize at this year’s festival.
Announcing the award at the Debussy Théâtre, Un Certain Regard jury president Leïla Bekhti said Wollner’s film depicted “the lived experience of grief,” adding that it “shook us to our core.”
The film follows a mother, her young daughter, and a teenage boy who, united by grief following a tragedy, travel to the Canary Islands for a family holiday that never happened. As the trip unfolds, past and present, and fiction and reality, begin quietly to blur. Wollner described the film’s animating question to The Hollywood Reporter before its premiere: “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.”
The film stars Birgit Minichmayr, known for her roles in Maren Ade’s Everyone Else and Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, alongside Lotte Shirin Keiling, Tristan Lopez and Carla Hüttermann. The cinematography comes from Gregory Oke, who previously shot Aftersun. Variety called it “the most refined and inventive formal statement in this year’s Un Certain Regard program.”
Everytime is Wollner’s third feature. Her debut, The Impossible Picture, won the best film prize from the German Film Critics Association and the Ingmar Bergman International Debut Award at the Göteborg Film Festival. Her second, The Trouble With Being Born, won the special jury prize in the Encounters section at the 2020 Berlin Film Festival.
1-2 Special was launched in February 2025 by former Sideshow executive Jason Hellerstein as a theatrical-first distributor dedicated to festival cinema. The company also acquired the Cannes Critics’ Week winner La Gradiva during this year’s festival. The deal for Everytime was negotiated by international sales agent Charades on behalf of the filmmakers.
