Lapsis
Director: Noah Hutton Run Time: 108 min. Rating: NR Release Year: 2021
Starring: Babe Howard, Dean Imperial, Ivory Aquino, Madeline Wise
Country: United States
Language: English
Presented in the Virtual Screening Room in partnership with Film Movement.
“An ambitious blend of modern technology and timeless concerns, bolstered by a winking good humor.”
– Kate Erbland for IndieWire
About the film:
Official Selection of SXSW 2020, Fantasia, and Cleveland International Film Festival. Nominated for Best First Screenplay at the 2021 Film Independent Spirit Awards.
In a parallel present, delivery man Ray Tincelli is struggling to support himself and his ailing younger brother. After a series of two-bit hustles and unsuccessful swindles, Ray takes a job in a strange new realm of the gig economy: trekking deep into the forest, pulling cable over miles of terrain to connect large, metal cubes that link together the new quantum trading market. As he gets pulled deeper into the zone, he encounters growing hostility and the threat of robot cablers, and must choose to either help his fellow workers or to get rich and get out.
About the filmmaker:
Born in L.A. and a graduate of Wesleyan University where he studied art history and neuroscience, Noah Hutton’s work focuses on the dialogue between art and science. He directed 30 short films about the human mind for Scientific American and was a featured speaker at the 2013 Association of Neuroaesthetics Symposium at the Venice Biennale. At Doc NYC 2020, he premiered In Silico, a documentary begun in 2009 about an ambitious ten-year, billion-euro project to simulate the human brain. Inspired by the research, he created Brain City, an animation using the latest imagery of the human brain that played as part of the Times Square Arts’ Midnight Moment series.
He also previously directed two feature documentaries on the oil industry in Stanley, North Dakota: his 2009 award-winning directorial debut Crude Independence, and his insightful follow-up Deep Time focused on climate change and the effects of the fossil fuel business on the Indigenous community. The film was selected for the Global Health Competition at the 2016 Cleveland International Film Festival.
He leads the production company Couple 3 Films, and in 2018, he made the compelling short documentary Guts about a marine plastics lab in Newfoundland. Inspired by their organization’s protocols, ethics, and research designs, Hutton adapted their guidelines into a filmmaking handbook for independent film production.
Hutton wrote, directed, scored, and edited Lapsis, his debut narrative feature. Read more in his interview with Matt Warren for Film Independent or listen to his interview with Mike Kaspar for Film School Radio.
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