Original sci-fi world with timely political themes: The film imagines a gig economy organized around a boom in quantum computing where predatory corporate forces threaten everyday workers tasked with the work needed to lay this new quantum infrastructure in rural areas. This work takes the form of laying cable through huge swaths of forests, connecting massive cubic transistors. The film portrays human laborers who are forced to work without basic protections and are often robbed of their routes by automated cabling robots. These themes are central to some of the political discourse surrounding the 2020 presidential campaign, raised by Andrew Yang and others, about the threat of automation and the issues faced by gig economy laborers around the world. They are also part of the growing awareness of the exploitation of workers subcontracted by big tech giants like Amazon, kept on timers and forced to sacrifice basic physical comforts in order to compete for their paychecks.

 

A twist on the sci-fi genre: Lapsis is a genre film, using sci-fi in similar ways to shows like Black Mirror. But instead of focusing on a glitzy, high tech, white-collar world like so many other sci-fi films and shows do, Lapsis is blue-collar sci-fi. It’s a gritty story of the messy exploitative underbelly that tech companies often rely on to uphold their glossy facades.

 

Noah Hutton as first-time narrative director, bringing this world into focus: Noah wrote the original screenplay for Lapsis and rounded up a team of collaborators to make the world of the film come to life in upstate New York last summer. His vision included an army of automated robots, so he sought out a