In the age of the RED Camera and the Arri Alexa, it takes a certain kind of chutzpah to shoot your film in black-and-white on the kind of low-grade digital video camera your parents used in the eighties. Andrew Bujalski, however, isn’t like most directors and he’s given his awkward period comedy “Computer Chess” the lo-fi aesthetic it deserves. The first trailer has hit online in all its 1.33 glory.
Set over the course of a weekend in the 80s, Bujalski’s film centers on software programmers at a chess tournament fumbling through social encounters and laying the groundwork for artificial intelligence as we know it and will come to know it in the future. The film won the Alfred P. Sloan Prize — an award given to the best film that focuses on science or technology — at the Sundance Film Festival and will open in limited release on July 17th before opening in more markets the rest of the summer. Watch the trailer below and remember, always protect the queen.