DIRECTOR’S NOTES

AETERNUM is born from a simple urgency: to understand where, in today’s hyperconnected, technology-driven life, the human being’s inner longing for things that endure over time still survives. The film tells the story of a journey through a structure that reverses time: each day corresponds to a Day of Creation lived in reverse. As the story unfolds, the primordial elements — light, waters, earth, sky — resurface, freed from the weight of the technology that has buried them. This is not a stylistic exercise: it is a way of giving the viewer back an original way of looking at the world, where nature and the cosmos become places of revelation once again. This architecture puts Saint Augustine’s The City of God in direct dialogue with Eastern contemplation, building a bridge between two ways of understanding being that the film never stops traveling.

In this sense, AETERNUM is the first contemporary cinematic rewriting of The City of God — understood as a symbolic map of human interiority, in dialogue with Shambhala, the legendary ‘city of light’ of Eastern cosmologies and a symbol of knowledge and universal harmony. On one side, the Earthly City, dominated by an artificial intelligence that makes everything efficient and everyone the same; on the other, the Inner City, where memory, consciousness, and responsibility toward others are rekindled. Holding these two worlds together is Tenzan, a Japanese hermit and master of Eastern philosophies: through his silence and his relationship with the mountain, he offers the protagonist, Aura, a key that fuses Western doctrine with Eastern sensibility — one of the beating hearts of the film. 

The artificial intelligence in the film is not an enemy to be defeated. It is a mirror: it shows how vulnerable we become when we lose touch with our own inner selves. We confront this in a historical moment marked by war and widespread precariousness, and an increasingly exhausted planet, and the question AETERNUM poses is as simple as it is urgent: can there be peace outside, for humankind and for the Earth that hosts it, without first finding it within?

Aura’s journey — her study, her transformation — becomes a necessary act of reclaiming a center capable of radiating something new.

Marta, too, who experiences a partial hearing disability on set, embodies this idea: isolated from the chaos of the city, she becomes receptive to the invisible frequencies of nature — proof that a true culture of peace is born from the authentic listening to one’s own fragility.

Visually, the film moves from the cold, geometric rigidity of the city to the vastness of nature, and on to the cosmic expanse of the sky. Along this path, the shadow of evil also grows, beginning to overlap with the Prime Minister’s arc, bringing to the screen a metaphysical thriller that pits the oblivion of power against the light of awareness. That same shadow also takes on a very concrete, contemporary face: behind political power moves an industrial front that drills into the Earth in the name of efficiency — the same inner blindness the film exposes in mankind, here applied, on a planetary scale, to the body of the world itself. The astronomer Elion, meanwhile, opens up the celestial dimension not as mere scientific backdrop, but as a place of emotional resonance: the astronomical anomalies recorded by his observatory speak directly to Aura’s inner destiny — an entanglement that binds them even though the two have never met before now.

To tell this journey, AETERNUM integrates cutting-edge technologies — the 17K IMAX format, virtual production, the expressive use of Theta waves — not as technical showmanship, but as an extension of cinematic perception: tools designed to amplify the sensory experience and convey the emotional complexity of Aura’s path.

AETERNUM is, ultimately, a film that questions the present from a universal perspective: an invitation to pause, listen, contemplate, and recognize, within one’s own path, a fragment of eternity.

— Jordan River