I won’t log any time at the Texas Theatre today. Over time, as the festival gets more jam-packed, they’ve had to expand venues and put up temporary screens at other venues around Oak Cliff. Tonight’s features are at the Bishop Arts Theatre Center down Jefferson Boulevard and the Oak Cliff Assembly on the other side of the highway, both of which are primarily for stage productions.
Electric Child, another major score for the festival that premiered at Locarno, is our second feature in a row in which the main character spends half the film in a computer. In the film, Sonny (Elliott Crosset Hove) learns that his newborn child has a genetic disorder and will likely die before his first birthday. While his wife wants to focus on the time they have left, Jason pours all his energy into his other, electric child – he’s a programmer developing generalized artificial intelligence with simulations of an adolescent child dropped on a deserted island, tweaking his programming to increase his survival skills with every iteration. The film alternates between scenes in the real world and the simulation, which Jason begins to enter in an attempt to accelerate the tool’s learning in the hopes that it will find a cure for his baby.
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