Documentary Film (work-in-progress) | 90min | 4K 4:3 | Stereo
In his work-in-progress feature film Our Father, Robby Reis documents the creation of a digital doppelgänger of his late father with generative AI. Using voice-cloning tools, he reconstructs his father’s voice from a single audio cassette recording, and with facial animation software, he brings photographs to life, allowing his father to speak with subtle, lifelike expressions.
The film unfolds as a series of self-reflexive, posthumous correspondences—narrated letters in which father and son reflect on grief, parallel lives, their family’s migration from the Azores to Montreal, their contributions to Montreal’s Portuguese community, and his father’s uncanny digital rebirth. These exchanges intertwine with non-AI materials from Reis’ family archive—photographs, 8mm home movies, handwritten letters, and inherited keepsakes—creating a dialogue between past and present, mediated by technology. Additional vignettes capture the making of these encounters, offering reflections as poignant as the correspondences themselves.
Our Father is produced by Natali Film, and will be presented at Forum, RIDM’s Rough Cut Pitch in November 2025.
Reis is also expanding Our Father into a multimedia installation.
In an initial AI facial animation test, Reis uses the Live-Portrait platform to transform his favourite still portrait of his late father into a short video with subtle facial expressions, and the ElevenLabs voice-cloning platform to recreate his voice.
“In my first AI facial animation experiment, I used the AI image-generation platform Live Portrait to animate a still photo of my father, turning it into a short video where he makes subtle facial expressions. I uploaded his photo along with a headshot-style video of myself speaking—the AI mapped my movements onto his image to generate new expressions. I then replaced my own voice with my father’s cloned voice, created through ElevenLabs, using a few salvaged minutes of his speech from an old cassette. The platform analyzed his tone, rhythm, and inflection to generate a digital voice model, which I used to bring his words—and imagined conversations—back to life. These first experiments honestly shook me—not because they perfectly resembled my father, but because I realized I could make him say anything. It struck me that this technology could become a powerful tool for healing. Suddenly, confronting grief didn’t feel insurmountable. I even began to look forward to it.”
-Robby Reis
This sequence presents the digital rebirth of Reis’ father, in which he calmly recognizes that he is ‘not real’ during their reintroduction.
“While I fully acknowledge the risks AI poses to the livelihoods of artists and film technicians—and strongly oppose its use to replace human scriptwriters, to digitally simulate actors without their consent, or to distort historical truth through forged AI-generated documents—I also can’t ignore the exciting potential of its ethical applications, particularly in voice cloning in cinema. The potential to share the culturally relevant personal histories of individuals who have passed, using their own voices in a manner that resonates with diverse audiences, is too exciting a prospect to ignore. Ultimately, the dichotomy presented by Gen AI technology in the film industry does not necessarily signify its downfall. But, it does call for extensive debate and arbitration to ensure its responsible use, fostering opportunities for artists and technicians to thrive rather than become obsolete. This presents a significant challenge, but one that must be addressed to propel the art form forward. Producing Our Father along with writing about my experience and process, all while sparking discussions throughout the research and dissemination stages, is one way I aim to contribute to this important conversation.”
-Robby Reis
In this scene, a grieving son writes to his father, reflecting on their family’s vital role in the development of the local Portuguese community.
“As a second-generation Azorean immigrant, I’ve come to realize that the key to understanding myself more deeply—as painfully cliché as it sounds—can only be found through getting to know my father better posthumously. It should come as no surprise, then, that my art practice is shaped by memories of our relationship, and that my reimaginings of the past draw deeply on our family’s image archive. This approach first took shape after my father’s passing in 2010 and evolved in 2023 into anxious anticipation with the advent of widely accessible generative AI technologies. Despite the inherent solitude of this endeavour, it offers a cathartic and transformative path toward understanding the profound impact of his absence—a gesture meant to fill the void he left behind, only to reveal it even more vividly.“
-Robby Reis
In this scene, Reis’s father recounts their family’s contribution to Montreal’s Portuguese community in the late 1950s.
