Eliza McNitt
On This Day ... 1776
series
- AIPopDB score
- 59/100
- Format
- Short film
- Year
- 2025
- Views
- 62.3K
Synopsis
During an emergency childbirth, a mother's labour spirals into crisis and her newborn daughter is in danger. As the delivery turns critical, the mother reaches back through the women who came before her, the matriarchs of her line and, in the film's cosmic imagery, dying stars, and turns that inherited strength and her love into a force to save her child.
The film frames this as ancestral memory. Its premise draws on epigenetics, the idea that trauma and memory may pass down through generations, and follows a young woman uncovering the hidden history of her maternal line, guided by the voices of her ancestors encoded in her DNA. Scenes of the hospital room are intercut with images of cells forming, a baby's hand closing around its mother's, and the wider natural world.
The story is personal. It is inspired by the director's own experience of giving birth to a daughter with a heart condition, and by the day she herself was born, and it builds on family archives and her mother's memory. Its tone is intimate and poetic, centred on love, fear and inheritance.
Last Updated 25 October 2026
About the Show
Ancestra is an eight-minute short film written and directed by Eliza McNitt, produced by Primordial Soup, Darren Aronofsky's studio, in partnership with Google DeepMind. It premiered at the Tribeca Festival on 13 June 2025, the same day the makers' channel put the full film on YouTube, where it can be watched free.
The Sloan Science and Film page and Wikipedia both describe it as the first of three short films planned under the Primordial Soup and Google DeepMind partnership, made with DeepMind's video generation model Veo. A Spanish-language Digital Trends article says it mixes live-action footage with AI-generated visuals, built with Google Flow (which that article describes as combining Veo 3, Imagen and Gemini), and that McNitt trained the system on photographs from her own childhood and of her late father. It says the generated shots cover images that would be hard or impossible to film, such as fetal cell formation. The pages do not say which Veo version made which shots.
McNitt is a filmmaker whose earlier virtual reality trilogy Spheres was acquired for seven figures at Sundance in 2018. Aronofsky is credited as executive producer through Primordial Soup, a New York studio founded in 2025 and announced at Google I/O in May 2025 as a partnership with DeepMind on generative AI storytelling. A Polish film database lists Audrey Corsa, Max Gordon Moore and Melanie Nicholls-King in the cast, in the roles of mother, doctor and nurse.
The Tribeca premiere was followed by a roundtable moderated by Aronofsky. The film later drew debate: YouTube viewers asked what was filmed and what was generated, and some objected to a news headline saying every frame was AI generated. On 9 October 2025 McNitt posted that the film won the Gold in the Innovation category at the Ciclope Festival in Berlin.
Audience sentiment
What the comments say
101 comments about the show on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Letterboxd and Reddit · updated 25 Oct 2026
Overall
74%
positive
Score = positive ÷ all scored comments
Sentiment split
- Positive
- 75 comments
- 74%
- Mixed
- 7 comments
- 7%
- Negative
- 19 comments
- 19%
Mostly positive: viewers call it emotional and beautifully told, and the award post brings warm congratulations; criticism is of picture quality, the unsettling vocal sounds and hostility toward the trailer.
Top themes
Emotional story for parentsView comment on YouTube
Positive
“As i am a mum and have 4 kids , this movie is so emotional and perfect and amazing.”
Moving enough to bring tearsView comment on YouTube
Positive
“Wow. Stunning, absolutely stunning. It brought me to tears. 5 stars. Thank you!”
Called a masterpieceView post on Instagram
Positive
“This is a masterpiece, really.”
Odd, unsettling vocal soundsView comment on YouTube
Mixed
“…The voices making random guttural/groaning sounds made me feel like I'm at a pagan ritual making human sacrifices. It felt a little weird tbh.”
Poor bitrate hides the pictureView comment on YouTube
Negative
“Wish the bitrate was good enough to actually see anything, jeez you guys are trying to pioneer a new technology but can't even use the old ones properly in the first place. Even at 4k it's noticable.”
Trailer looks bad to someView comment on YouTube
Negative
“Surprise surprise, this looks absolutely terrible.”
By platform
YouTube67 comments
- Positive
- 69%
- Mixed
- 9%
- Negative
- 22%
TikTok5 comments
- Positive
- 60%
- Mixed
- 0%
- Negative
- 40%
Instagram26 comments
- Positive
- 100%
- Mixed
- 0%
- Negative
- 0%
Letterboxd2 comments
- Positive
- 0%
- Mixed
- 50%
- Negative
- 50%
Reddit1 comment
- Positive
- 0%
- Mixed
- 0%
- Negative
- 100%
Image: ytimg.com
Image: ytimg.com
Image: ytimg.com
Fun Facts
- Made with Google Flow
- Digital Trends says the short was built in Google Flow, which it describes as combining Veo 3, Imagen and Gemini, and mixes live action with generated visuals.
- Source: es.digitaltrends.com
- Personal photographs
- The same article says McNitt trained the AI on photos of her childhood and of her late father, and used it for shots hard to film such as fetal cell formation.
- Source: es.digitaltrends.com
- First of three shorts
- Sloan Science and Film calls it the first of three shorts planned under the Primordial Soup and Google DeepMind partnership.
- Source: scienceandfilm.org
Related content
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Credits
- Director
- Eliza McNitt
- Written by
- Eliza McNitt
- Cast
- Audrey Corsa as Mother · Max Gordon Moore as Doctor · Melanie Nicholls-King as Nurse
- Studio
- Google DeepMind, Primordial Soup
- Produced by
- Darren Aronofsky
- Generated with
- Veo 3
Cast & Crew
On Social Media
On Social Media
TikTok
On YouTube