Michael Jeanpert is a french director and screenwriter born in Paris on September 12, 1977. In 2010, he directed a spec Nike Basketball commercial which was very successful, with more than a million views on youtube. In 2018, he wrote and directed BACKDOOR, a short film acquired by Amazon Prime video and other platforms in the US, Canada and the UK. The film was also broadcast on several television channels in Europe.
Director Statement
My generation has witnessed the birth and explosive development of personal computing and its applications. Like many people my age, I’m addicted to new technologies and fascinated by what we can accomplish with these tools. But this revolution gives us abilities that could overwhelm us in the near future. Location tracking, manipulation, spying, rights infringement and breach of privacy, addiction, depression… The list of problems associated with this new world is as long as the list of solutions it provides.
In this context, artificial intelligence is becoming one of the biggest challenges of our society. Today, more than half of the world’s internet traffic is generated by bots, automated computer programs that replicate human behavior to interact with people without anyone noticing.
Our daily lives are full of increasingly smart, connected devices. We speak to our phones, to our refrigerators, to our cars. And I wonder, as many do, if we are not creating a monster, while some people already claim that social networks algorithms are destroying democracy.
This film can therefore easily be categorized as science fiction, but first and foremost it is a love story. What motivates me so much in this project is the idea that love, specific to human beings until now, can be found to exist somewhere else, where in theory it is impossible to find it.
To achieve this, I want to place the viewer in a realistic universe, romantic and reassuring, then slowly shift towards the fantasy to let him wonder about our place in this new world. Talk about the possibility that this monster we have created may be more worthy of love than mankind itself. That love always finds a way, that a bot, an “automated” may develop a conscience on its own, a soul, without his maker intending to.
This is to me the most fascinating theme science fiction
has to give us.
Michael Jeanpert
Thriller/Suspense Film and Writing Festival 