How to Talk to Lydia? 
Documentary Film

Short Synopsis​

“How to Talk to Lydia?” tells the story of Moldovan migrant worker Damian, navigating the postmodern world in foreign country, within the walls of a German warehouse, where an artificial mind named “Lydia” guides his every move.

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At 24, Damian leaves his small village in Moldova — a landscape shaped by community and nature — to seek work abroad. His destination: a vast German logistics warehouse, where his every step as a “goods picker” is directed by an invisible supervisor — an artificial voice named Lydia. Inside this enormous, sterile building, towering shelves stretch endlessly in both directions, erasing any sense of individuality. Here, people, machines, and algorithms coexist on equal terms, bound together in the relentless rhythm of the global supply chain. Through Damian’s journey, the film contrasts the warmth and rootedness of rural life with the alienating precision of a postmodern workplace, asking how human stories survive in a world increasingly orchestrated by artificial intelligence.

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Grand Jury Prize

Awarded to How to Talk to Lydia? by Rusudan Gaprindashvili (Georgia/Germany, 2025, 72′)

Jury statement:
Supported by an intuition that is both powerfully cinematic and deeply relevant to the themes of health and safety in the workplace, How to Talk to Lydia? is a documentary that highlights the evolving interaction between human beings and artificial intelligence within contemporary neoliberal capitalism. By telling a story of economic migration in which the worker is forced to “wear” artificial intelligence—becoming its support, its physical extension—the film clearly exposes the dual nature of this relationship: the advantages of automation are mirrored by new risks and distortions. Among these is the paradoxical reversal that renders the dynamic itself pathological: Lydia, the voice generated by the wearable device, gives the worker precise instructions to perform physical tasks with greater accuracy and speed, thereby exposing them to the most dangerous operations in the process. At the same time, the alienation produced extends to language itself—flattened into a series of essential commands that turn everyday speech into a solitary mantra, a new expression of the worker’s fetishization not far from the nervous tics of Chaplin’s hands.