By Jason Dorrier — Singularity Hub
The desolate reaches of deep space figure heavily in today’s sci-fi short film double feature. Space, as it turns out, is really big and empty. Until we get warp drive or discover a local wormhole—getting anywhere will be a long, lonely slog. The other thread tying the films together? They’re both by director Eli Sasich.
First up is HENRi. The film is like an episode of Life After People in space. What happens to a ship’s artificially intelligent computer after its crew dies? It gets melancholy, begins missing its human friends something terrible, and builds itself a robot body out of the ship’s rusty scrap and spare parts.
“My particular interest for this film was memory and its intrinsic relationship with consciousness,” Sasich writes in an article about the film’s making. “I also wanted a robot of my very own.”