A widowed programmer who builds a digital copy of his late wife ends up turning grief into a business in “Talk to Me When You Are Dead,” the debut feature from Singapore’s Alvin Lee, produced by Anthony Chen and Gina Tan. The project is part of the Asian Project Market, which runs within the Busan International Film Festival’s Asian Contents & Film Market (ACFM). In the near-future story, Yong Yi makes a digital replica of his wife Kate to cope with losing her.
A friend spots a market and talks him into a startup that sells grief-bots to the newly bereaved. Yong Yi is then hired to quietly build a replica of Mr. Yun, a celebrated architect who is terminally ill.
Hiding his real purpose to get close to him, Yong Yi records Mr. Yun’s memories, and the two grow into something like father and son. Yun weakens, Yong Yi must choose between finishing a well-paid job and protecting a fragile man he now cares about, a crisis that finally makes him face what really happened to Kate.
The project is pitched as a black dramedy that probes the line between real connection and digital preservation. Lee began the film while grieving his best friend, who died four years ago. While he was writing, a relative asked him to create an AI-generated video of someone the family had lost.
That contradiction became the starting point of the film.” Lee says he hopes audiences leave with a sense of hope and a reminder to hold on to their humanity as technology floods everyday life. That is what makes us human,” he says. After several years in development, the script is now in its third draft.
Chen, who has tracked Lee’s short films since Lee was in film school, worked with him on shaping his first feature. Tan, who met Lee five years ago on joining one of his shorts, praises the light touch he brings to a range of subjects. That sensibility is precisely what ‘Talk to Me When You Are Dead’ demands, and precisely why he is the right person to make it,” Tan says.
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