Blackberry

Wednesday 19 March at 7.30pm

Matt Johnson | Canada | 2023 | 120 mins | M offensive language

This whip-smart Canadian comedy channels the zippy snark of The Social Network to tell the extraordinarily dramatic rise and equally spectacular fall of the world’s first smartphone.

“The genius and hubris of the tech industry collide in this wildly entertaining account of the dramatic rise and fall of the world’s first smartphone. It was the product that would revolutionise the way we lived. Years before the iPhone, Canadian innovator Mike Lazaridis (played by comic mainstay Jay Baruchel) teamed up with cutthroat entrepreneur Jim Balsillie (a ferocious Glenn Howerton, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) to bring the world a mobile phone that would also allow users to—you’ll never believe this—send and receive emails. Like a blend of The Social Network and The Office, BlackBerry reimagines the meetings, schemes, pipe dreams and pizza boxes that gave rise to the titular tech sensation… Mock-documentary specialist Matt Johnson takes us back to the mid-90s and to the beginnings of BlackBerry’s wild ride to cultural ‘CrackBerry’ ubiquity. Loosely based on the 2015 tell-all book Losing the Signal, the film delivers a slyly satirical and frequently uproarious look at the creative chaos of the tech world as the geeks inherit the Earth.”—Melbourne International Film Festival 2023