In this episode host Kevin Gustafson talks with Noah Hutton, the writer, director, editor and score composer of the new film Lapsis. Lapsis was selected to premiere at SXSW in the narrative feature competition and has since won the grand jury prize at BIFAN in South Korea. At its core, the film is political, both in style and substance and has been compared to Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You and Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You.

Lapsis comments on the already dystopian gig economy by imagining taxing manual labor in the forest, which is at the foundation of new wall street gains after a quantum computing boom. The gig work takes the form of laying cable through huge swaths of forests, connecting massive cubic transistors, and the film portrays human laborers who are forced to work without basic protections and are often robbed of their routes by automated cabling robots. Lapsis makes the case for collective action and organizing as the way to combat exploitation, especially given the recent catastrophe of prop 22.

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