A girl’s mysterious disappearance sends her bereaved mother on a search for answers. But the unsettling truths she discovers will force her to rethink her ideas of God and faith, in a potentially haunting series that probes at eternal questions about life after death.
“The Cloud” is partly set on earth and partly in an imagined afterlife, where human consciousness is uploaded into a digital blizzard of zeros and ones. Created by Lithuania’s Domanté Urmonaité and Martynas Mendelis, the 8 x 50’ series was selected for the drama series pitching competition in MIA.
Built around the season-long story arc of the girl’s disappearance, “The Cloud” will use parallel story lines to explore existential dilemmas about faith, mortality and the afterlife. “How far can blind faith take you? How far can we go by trusting our lives to artificial minds?” the creators asked. “At its core, ‘The Cloud’ is a show about faith. And we’re not talking only about faith in God. It’s also about faith in the greater purpose, faith in destiny, and faith in human beings.”
Urmonaité and Mendelis said the idea grew out of their own curiosity and uncertainty. “We are constantly wondering about the future and challenging each other with all kinds of ‘what if’ questions,” they said. “These questions inspire us to speculate on new conspiracy theories and look for proof that they might exist in our real world. This time, we became obsessed with the idea that religion could be a device designed by Artificial Intelligence.”
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Urmonaité and Mendelis will be in Rome with a mini-story bible and pilot script, looking to find producers, distributors and broadcasters “with the same passion for our project,” they said. The duo are also currently developing a drama series, “The Beehive,” with Sky Italia.
While “The Cloud” will speculate on the kind of digital immortality posited by futurists, who believe technology and human consciousness will merge in our lifetimes, Urmonaité and Mendelis are less interested in wooing viewers with flashy sci-fi gimmicks than human stories that will create a strong emotional resonance.
“The idea of a digital afterlife became an exciting playground, but we didn’t want to populate it with flying cars, spaceships, and other futuristic elements,” they said. “We are always eager to put a simple human being at the heart of our stories, and speculate how technologies affect them in the world that is similar to ours.”