The short film “Ancestra,” directed by Eliza McNitt and produced by Darren Aronofsky premiered at the 2025 Tribeca Festival. It is groundbreaking because of its use of AI generated imagery. The narrative centers on a mother’s profound love for her baby daughter as she calls upon cosmic, ancestral forces to intervene during a childbirth crisis. This deeply personal story draws inspiration from McNitt’s own birth experience, blending live-action performances with AI-generated visuals to depict cosmic and microscopic phenomena.
It is visually stunning. The problem of getting a newborn baby to smile and express on cue has been solved by AI trained on McNitt’s baby photos. Additionally, the narrative effectively conveys the depth of a mother’s love and the lengths she would go to protect her child.
As compelling as the film’s portrayal of a mother’s love is, however, it shifts the source of love from God to impersonal spirits of maternal ancestors. This perspective aligns with a worldview that attributes human emotions and actions to natural phenomena, dismissing the recognition of a transcendent Creator of life. This is the downside of the film. Predictably, it works from a materialist worldview while also wanting to emphasize immaterial things like love and an afterlife. Unfortunately, if the evolutionary story is true, love is just a chemical process in our brains, and the maternal forces of the past, or dead grandmothers to be blunt, have no power to help us. They are dust and bones according to evolutionary theory, nothing more.
By presenting maternal love as an ambiguous cosmic force rather than a reflection of God’s love, and calling upon the spirits of ancestors for aid rather than praying to God for divine intervention, the film secularizes concepts rooted in Christian theology. Nevertheless, the love between mother and baby is based so deeply in reality that the film still comes across as a pro-life piece. Christian artists need to watch “Ancestra” and improve upon it, using new technology to convey the same message from a biblical perspective. And we must keep speaking the truth in the arts: If evolutionists were consistent with their own worldview, they would have nothing interesting to say.