OBEX - Director Albert Birney

In pre-internet 1987, Conor and his dog Sandy live a life of seclusion, lost in the slow-rendering graphics of early Macs and televisions aglow with late night horror movie marathons. But when he begins playing OBEX, a new and mysterious, state-of-the-art computer game, he finds himself trapped in a low-tech, but high-stakes analog hellscape as the line between reality and game blurs. Audacious and uncanny, writer-director Albert Birney's OBEX is a delightfully skewed lo-fi fantasy. Shot in striking black and white, this surreally nostalgic nightmare revisits the dawn of personal computing to reflect on the loneliness of our always-online present day.

About the filmmaker - Albert Birney is a Baltimore based filmmaker. He has directed six feature films: The Beast Pageant (co-directed with Jon Moses), Sylvio and Strawberry Mansion (both co-directed with Kentucker Audley), Tux and Fanny, Eyeballs in the Darkness and OBEX. Sylvio was named on eof the ten-best films of 2017 by The New Yorker. His films have premiered at Sundance, SXSW, the Maryland Film Festival, Slamdance and the Ottawa International Animation Festival. In 2021, he released a Tux and Fanny video game that he made with Gabriel Koenig.