The opening night film for the 2014 Windrider Bay Area Film Festival is Hank and Asha, a charming story about a romance that blossoms via technological mediums. Hank and Asha‘s narrative conceit—video letters–is novel, but the idea of technologicallly aided romantic correspondance is not.
Over the past few years as digital communication in many forms has crept into every aspect of our lives, movies have explored the ramifications of this development in more ways than we can count.
To write about movies is to write about everything, since movies deal with the issues facing a society today. Since this topic has been on all our minds and in our movies, we’ve written about it quite a bit in one form or another over the past few years.
If you are interested in allowing movies to spark your thoughts on the intersections between technology and relationships, consult the following reviews, articles, and podcasts for more films to watch.
Last year’s Windrider Bay Area Film Festival featured Love Hacking, a short docuementary about a couple who fall in love via Skype. Elijah Davidson and his wife, Krista, recorded a Reel Spirituality Podcast epsiode talking about the film and the place technology played in the early days of their relationship.
Source Code posits that technology might be used to create a better world, to set all things right, and to bring two people together who otherwise would never have met. If you haven’t seen this often overlooked gem, pick it up and watch it soon. If you need more convincing, read our review.
The most high-profile film about a digitally-mediated relationship in recent years has to be Spike Jones’ Her. The film follows a futuristic man as he falls in love with his operating system. The film isn’t as strange as it sounds, and the questions it asks about love and loneliness end up being pretty universal. Here’s our review of Her.
Iron Man 3 provided Kester Brewin with an opportunity to explore the ways in which the things we create in turn create us and how the path to wholeness for any magician, technological or otherwise, is to lay aside her or his magic in favor of authentic relationships. Read his challenging article here.
The Infinite Man, a new film that premiered at the 2014 South By Southwest Festival. explores the lengths one brilliant inventor will go to create the perfect weekend for his girlfriend. There’s time travel, multiple versions of the same person, and Australian accents galore in this soon to be released film. Read our early review here.
Ben Sitller’s Walter Mitty lives a secret life in his imagination. His desire to win the girl of his dreams sends him on a world-wide adventure during which he hardly has time to complete his online dating profile. The film is a call for us to put down our phones and talk to one another. Read our review of the film here.