The first trail­er for After Yang wel­comes an android into the family

This seemed to be a qui­eter Sun­dance than most, due at least in part to the all-online form it had to take while a viral spike put the kibosh on large gath­er­ings, but the pro­gram still yield­ed a hand­ful of major suc­cess sto­ries. One such film is Kog­o­na­da​’s sec­ond fea­ture After Yang, which racked up anoth­er round of plau­dits after open­ing to a warm recep­tion at Cannes last year.

We can get a whiff of why in the first trail­er for the ten­der sci-fi dra­ma, which arrived online just this morn­ing. Even in morsel form, the open-heart­ed sen­si­bil­i­ty of the video-essayist-turned-director’s med­i­ta­tion on fam­i­ly, mem­o­ry, and love comes through loud and clear.

In a dis­tant future of Jedi-style cou­ture and glit­ter­ing sky­scrap­ers, it’s not uncom­mon for fam­i­lies to adopt robots in the guise of young peo­ple, part house­hold help and part off­spring. For mar­ried cou­ple Jake (Col­in Far­rell) and Kyra (Jodie Turn­er-Smith), this pos­es a prob­lem when the android (Justin H. Min) they’ve come to love like one of their own faces obso­les­cence and impend­ing tech-death like a past-its-prime iPhone, to the great despair of their human daugh­ter Mika (Malea Emma Tjan­draw­id­ja­ja).

In her review from the film’s pre­mière at Cannes, our gal on the scene Han­nah Strong wrote pos­i­tive­ly of the ​“seren­i­ty and melan­choly” in the world Kogonada’s cre­at­ed. She ulti­mate­ly con­clud­ed: ​“There are shades of Ter­rence Mal­ick in Kogonada’s rev­er­ence for the nat­ur­al world, but he man­ages to cre­ate some­thing that is com­plete­ly his own, brim­ming with intri­cate detail and del­i­cate soul.”

Fans of the World of Tomor­row ani­mat­ed series, take note – Kogonada’s inter­est in the mechan­ics of cloning and robot­ics, com­bined with his equal bal­ance of the sen­ti­men­tal and cere­bral, echoes the recent tri­umphs of Don Hertzfeldt. (Less sim­i­lar in tone but clos­er in con­tent is the Ray Brad­bury-penned Twi­light Zone episode ​‘I Sing The Body Elec­tric,’ in which a cir­cuit­board grand­ma must be ​“retired” in the same sense as poor Yang.)

After Yang will come to cin­e­mas in the US on 4 March, and will also stream through Show­time. A date for the UK has yet to be set.