PETE

In the wake of her husband's suicide, a grieving robot mechanic embarks on a cross-country search for the machine's elusive creator. As she carries the memories of a man encoded in circuits, she confronts the quiet devastation of progress and the human cost buried beneath innovation's promise.

PETE exists because I'm haunted by the question of what we do with grief when the world insists it be "useful." I'm writing it from inside the contradiction of our moment: we're surrounded by tools that promise comfort, clarity, optimization, yet the most human experiences remain stubbornly unfixable. In this story, a malfunctioning art-restoration machine becomes the most dangerous kind of object: a mirror. It reflects back the parts of ourselves we've tried to outsource (mourning, love, memory, guilt) and asks what happens when a system offers us a version of the dead that's good enough to keep us from letting go.

The film explores how personal loss becomes raw material for institutions built on extraction. It's about grief as weight, the kind you carry even when you pretend you're "fine." It's about performance, the masks we wear to survive, at work, in relationships, in the stories we tell ourselves about progress. It's about system, the corporate and technological machinery that turns pain into product and calls it healing. And it's about contradiction: the longing to resurrect what's gone, and the terrifying relief of realizing a perfect copy still isn't the thing you loved. PETE is ultimately a story about what can't be restored, and the quiet, radical act of choosing what to let burn.