Avarya (19:30)
Dust.tv; IMDb; Short of the Week; Vimeo; YouTube

This 2020 short film was presented by Dust in 2020.

This is a Turkish film, with English subtitles. It begins with Asimov's three laws of robotics: A robot may not harm a human being or through inaction allow a human to come to harm; a robot must obey the orders given it by a human being, unless those orders conflict with the first law; and, well, the third law doesn't actually come into play in this story, so I won't mention it. There's an old man who lives in a spaceship designed to look exactly like his house on Earth. He is alone aside from a robot who pilots the ship from star system to star system, always looking for a new planet for the man to settle on, since Earth has become barely habitable. Many worlds seem to come quite close to being perfect, but because of the first law of robotics, the robot never accepts any of the worlds as sufficient to ensure the man's long-term survival. The robot refuses to obey his orders to let him land on any of the planets they find. The man is constantly frustrated by this, having spent countless years (possibly centuries) aboard the ship, though most of that time is apparently spent asleep while the ship travels.

Well, that's the basic setup of the story. The whole film is rather compelling, even if it takes awhile to tell its story. (I mean, 20 minutes isn't exactly centuries, but it's long enough.) Anyway, the visuals are excellent (it's the kind of CGI that could almost be mistaken for stop-motion animation). And one can't help but empathize with the old man. And the way it ends... implies that this has all happened before.