A mysterious murder leads an old-school detective and a fearless researcher to team up and track down the rogue AI behind a new memory-replicating technology in Parallel Minds, the latest film by Calgary-based Métis filmmaker Benjamin Ross Hayden.
After touring the world on the festival circuit, Parallel Minds is now opening theatrically across Canada and this weekend Hayden will attend the film’s Nanaimo debut at Avalon Cinema.
Hayden said the film asks questions about the ultimate goal of data-collecting technologies and ponders “what of our humanity do we stand to give away as we move forward into the future?”
Hayden said the film views science fiction through an indigenous perspective, as it explores “the contrast and the conflict between traditional knowledge and the processing of digital information and digital knowledge.” He said the AI, called URM, plays the role of the trickster.
“The character of URM in Parallel Minds very much represents a trickster entity that is all around us and surrounding us the way that artificial intelligence does and is in a way elusive and is in his own way consuming as a trickster often is,” he said.
WHAT’S ON … Parallel Minds screens at Avalon Cinema, Woodgrove Centre, from Nov. 6 to 8.
arts@nanaimobulletin.com
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