Cold Souls and Madame Bovary director Sophie Barthes returned to Sundance Film Festival earlier this year with her latest feature The Pod Generation. Led by Emilia Clarke and Chiwetel Ejiofor, the film follows their characters living in a not-so-distant future in New York, taking a wild ride to parenthood after landing a coveted spot at the Womb Center, which offers couples a convenient and shareable pregnancy by way of detachable, artificial wombs, or pods. Ahead of an August 11 theatrical release, the first trailer has now arrived.
John Fink said in his review, “A sharp relationship satire that proves the more things change, the more they stay the same, Sophie Barthes’ The Pod Generation imagines a world of, to borrow Aaron Bastani’s idea, Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Are there poor people in this imagined futuristic world of the United States? (We can only identify the country because there’s a post office visit later in the film.) Perhaps. The film does include a world beyond the city where people actually live in nature, rather than hermetically-sealed smart homes where toast is 3D-printed to your desired crispness. It’s a hell of a clean, sterile, fully automated city, one that looks as if the film’s production team (Clem Price Thomas, Stephan Rubens, and Marion Michel) had the run of an Ikea.”
See the trailer below.
The Pod Generation opens on August 11.