Sept 15-21 Mockumentary Week: “Ladies and gentlemen, by way of introduction, this is a film about trickery – and fraud. About lies. Tell it by the fireside, in a marketplace, or in a movie. Almost any story is almost certainly some kind of lie. But not this time. No, this is a promise. During the next hour, everything you hear from us is really *true* and based on solid facts.”

Directed and written by Andrew Bujalski (Mutual Appreciation), the godfather of mumblecore, this was shot with analog video cameras with an improvisational script. It takes place in 1980, the early days of AI — which gets mentioned — as a bunch of computer guys bring their computers to play chess against one another, while a human potential group attempts to connect with the nerds. And by that, I mean have sex with them.

Yet in spite of this feeling like a fly on the wall and real, it doesn’t feel forced.

Pauline: Peter, did you ever stop and ask yourself how many squares are on a chessboard?

Peter: 64. It’s an 8 by 8 grid.

Pauline: Well… but don’t you see how limited that is?

Peter: No, it’s actually very complex once you start to think about it as a programming problem. Just the number of possible games explodes exponentially with each move; it’s close to 10 to the 120th power. And to try to compute all those games might take even longer than humanity would be around to do so.

Some people want to feel a connection. Others just want to program computers to do it for them.

A quirky, magic little movie.

You can watch this on Tubi.