Conceiving Ada is a 1997 film produced, written, and directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson.
Upon its February 1999 premiere in New York City, Stephen Holden of The New York Times called its premise "intriguing" though he felt the film is "much better at throwing out ideas than at telling a story or at creating compelling characters"; and that it has a "overall air of woodenness and shrill didacticism".
[2] That same month, Edward Guthmann of the San Francisco Chronicle called it a "film without category or precedent.
A meditation on memory, feminism, immortality and the horizons of virtual reality, it's got enough ideas and intellectual fodder for a dozen films — which is its virtue and its defect at the same time.
Directed by local video artist Lynn Hershman Leeson, Conceiving Ada is a fanciful, multilayered experiment about two women who connect through cyberspace across the divide of time and discover some remarkable parallels between their lives.