Elli is an android and lives with a man she calls her father. Together they drift through the summer, swimming during the day until he takes her to bed at night. She shares his memories and anything else he programs her to recall. Yet, one night she sets off into the woods following a fading echo.

Pinocchio and A.I.’s exploration of the desire to create artificial life is taken to boldly provocative lengths in Sandra Wollner’s incisive and unsettling modern fable. Told with cut-glass precision and eerie subjectivity, The Trouble with Being Born plumbs the darkest depths of the uncanny valley.