A 2013 film predicted the exact AI conflict that defined the 2023 Hollywood strikes.
In short: In Ari Folman's The Congress, an aging actress sells her digital likeness to a studio, effectively ending her career as a human performer. A decade later, this surreal science-fiction drama became a touchstone for real-world labor disputes, as actors faced similar proposals to sign away their digital images forever.
The Congress follows a fictionalized version of Robin Wright, who agrees to have her body scanned and digitized by Miramount Studios. In exchange for a significant payout, she signs a contract that forbids her from acting again, allowing the studio to use her computer-generated avatar in any film they choose. Twenty years later, the film shifts into a surreal, animated utopia where the public consumes hallucinogenic drugs to inhabit their own digital avatars, mirroring the studio's commodification of Wright's persona.
Director Ari Folman loosely adapted the screenplay from Stanisław Lem's 1971 novel, The Futurological Congress. While the book focused on communist dictatorship, Folman reimagined the allegory to critique the entertainment industry's own power structures. The film’s production was a massive undertaking, involving six animation studios across the globe and nineteen years of script development. Principal photography for the live-action segments took place in the United States and Germany in early 2011, with the final film premiering at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.
The film's narrative takes a dark turn when Wright discovers that the studio's technology has evolved to allow anyone to transform into her likeness. The story explores the tension between the comfort of an illusory, animated existence and the harsh, dystopian reality of the physical world. By the time Wright attempts to return to reality to find her son, she discovers that most of humanity has already abandoned the physical world for the digital one.
Though initially praised for its technical ambition and Wright's performance, the film gained renewed cultural relevance during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Critics and industry observers noted that the studio's proposal in the film—to scan actors for a single day's pay and retain their likeness in perpetuity—mirrored the actual contract disputes between performers and major studios. This eerie foresight cemented the film's status as a significant, if messy, meditation on the intersection of technology, labor, and the future of human identity.
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- Summary by Intellect · source: The Congress (2013 film)
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