Love, Rendered

Ethelle and Burt have shared a lifetime together, but as Burt's memory begins to fade, so too does the story of how their love began. Holding onto one cherished moment that was never photographed or recorded, Ethelle works with clinical experts and her family to recreate their first meeting using emerging AI technology. LOVE, RENDERED is an intimate documentary short about love, memory, aging and the ways new tools may help preserve human connection.

Directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Liz Garbus and produced by Dan Cogan and Darren Aronofsky.

Creative Team. Love, Rendered is made by the production companies Story Syndicate, Primordial Soup, and 100 Zeroes. The film marks Primordial Soup and 100 Zeroes' third collaboration.

Technology with Empathy. Love, Rendered is a deeply human documentary following Burt and Ethelle as they navigate the fragile realities of cognitive decline and memory loss. At its heart, the film explores how cutting-edge technology can be leveraged with empathy—demonstrating that technology can unlock opportunities for storytelling, in this case, reconstructing a family’s most cherished, unphotographed memories.

Tech & Elderly. The film shows how innovative storytelling can help trigger memory and emotional preservation—giving aging loved ones the ultimate gift of experiencing a piece of their history that was never before documented and having the agency to craft it alongside the technology.

Bridging Generations: While this technology may not reverse cognitive decline, the shared experience of recreating these memories served as a powerful catalyst for family unity. The film highlights how the process built an emotional bridge across generations—bringing the family closer than ever before and creating deeply meaningful breakthroughs between aging loved ones and their grandchildren.

Grounding Innovation in transparency. To truly understand how cutting-edge technology impacts real people, the filmmaking team chose radical transparency by revealing the technical process in how they went about to make the film. The trial and error captures the unvarnished reality of Burt and Ethelle’s daily lives alongside the film and tech crews.

Human in the loop: The co-creation framework. The technical achievements in this film are not automated visual effects, but testaments of human-driven collaboration. Nothing was a push-button result of a simple text prompt, but rather the culmination of extensive archival research, design, trial and error with Ethelle’s feedback in an attempt to achieve maximum authenticity.