Film

Bujalski, the director of Funny Ha Ha and Beeswax (BAMcinemaFest 2009), is back with a true original—a lo-fi surrealist comedy about an imaginary 1980 chess conference where large, and sometimes hilariously defective, chess-playing computers and their nerdy programmers are pitted against a crusty grandmaster (Boston film critic Gerald Peary) to determine whether man or machine rules supreme. With humor so bone dry that one might mistake his film for a documentary, Bujalski employs a bleary-eyed black-and-white aesthetic by shooting with a vintage Portapak U-Matic video camera, which achieves a retro hyperrealism that mixes beautifully with the film’s shades of deadpan surrealism.

Producers: Houston King, Alex Lipschultz
Director of Photography: Matthias Grunsky
Editor: Andrew Bujalski