Opening Night Feature: “OBEX”

Conor Marsh lives a secluded life with his dog, Sandy, until one day he begins playing OBEX, a new, state-of-the-art computer game. When Sandy goes missing, the line between reality and game blurs and Conor must venture into the strange world of OBEX to bring her home.

Join us for the Capital City Film Festival’s opening night feature “OBEX” on Wednesday, April 2 at 6 PM at Central United Methodist Church. Entrance to this screening is included with all festival passes. If you are not a CCFF passholder, purchase your ticket now! 

“Baltimore-based writer-director Albert Birney (Strawberry Mansion, 2021 Sundance Film Festival) returns with another delightfully skewed and surreal lo-fi fantasy. Set in pre-internet 1987 and strikingly shot in monochromatic black and white, the film depicts Conor’s (Birney) lonely existence of solitary screen time, transfixed by early Macs with slowly rendering graphics and TVs aglow with the horror movie late show. Matching these hypnotic images, Birney immerses us in a dense soundscape of warm droning synths, clacking keyboards, malevolent static, chirping cicadas, and the click and whine of dot matrix printers. The film’s dreamy nostalgia soon becomes an analog nightmare as Conor finds himself trapped in a low-tech but high-stakes video game. Audacious and uncanny, “OBEX” revisits the dawn of personal computing to reflect on the loneliness of our always-online present.”

—Matt Cornell, Sundance Film Festival