Franz Milec

About

Replica is an adaptation of a 1942 storyboard L’amore è un lepidottero by Bruno Munari, Italian artist, designer, and experimental filmmaker. While the fascist-era original stacks dreamy melodrama against a wartime setting, the film approaches its source with a giallo sensibility.

Combining computer animation, improvised footage, archives, and AI in collage-like imagery, the film causes a temporal collapse. Each element speaks a different visual language, but unified, they create a rich textural conversation between digital smoothness, analog grain, and the paradoxical "hand-made" aesthetics of AI. The resulting tension comments on the relationship between technology and nostalgia, using advanced tools to recreate the very human qualities that said technology erases.

The film's process mirrors the news of Silicon Valley giants pirating terabytes of historical sources and destroying physical books to feed their machines. As the outpour of AI slop summons ghosts and pollutes our politics, Replica flips the script.

Cast & Crew

Franz Milec / animation, editing, effects, sound design
Martin Tauber / sound mix
Maria Sevcikova / actress

Selected Screenings

Ji.hlava International Documentary Festival 2025 / Jihlava, Czechia

Tech Rider

1x HD projector or large HD TV screen
1x 2ch sound system
1x media player with HDMI