AI Grief-Bot Dramedy ‘Talk to Me When You Are Dead,’ Produced by Anthony Chen, Probes the Limits of Digital Afterlives at Busan Asian Project Market

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. As Mr. 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. “I made it, and it gave real comfort to people I love, and I still do not know what to think about that,” Lee says. “The person in it was not really him, but the comfort it created was real. 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. “We can also live in comfort and denial, but many times the pain that breaks us is part of us, and vital to our growth. 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. “It has taken a few reiterations before we landed on this idea and I’m heartened that it comes from a personal place yet has wide universal appeal,” Chen says.

Tan, who met Lee five years ago on joining one of his shorts, praises the light touch he brings to a range of subjects. “He does not flinch from the hard things, but he never lets them become heavy-handed. 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.

Busan marks the project’s first outing, and the producers want it to put Lee on the map as a first-time feature director. They also hope to find co-producers, financiers and other collaborators, and believe the story is universal enough to travel across regions.

Lee is also developing his next idea, which takes on present-day Singapore concerns, among them a low birth rate and a shortage of land, and adds a supernatural element.