An Impossible Project review – life after digital in forward-looking retro doc

Florian Kaps - Vienna's answer to Steve Jobs - enthuses over analogue hardware and makes a persuasive case for moving beyond an online existence

Here is a documentary about the resurgent interest in retro culture that comes across like a warm fuzzy blanket of nostalgia for pre-Covid days. The central figure is Doc" Florian Kaps, who the film presents as Vienna's answer to Steve Jobs, a social visionary untroubled by such details as earning a living or indeed running a functioning business. Kaps' speciality is what he calls analogue": physical hardware such as manual switchboards, jukeboxes, printing presses, and the like, made obsolete by the rise of laptops and smartphones.

At the start of the film, Kaps' attention is caught by the failing Polaroid camera, and - seemingly on a whim - he agrees to take over the company's last factory, in the Netherlands. (We are not told much about his finances, other than the occasional arrival of tech investor types who pop up whenever needed.) It soon becomes clear that Kaps' visionary utterances (What does Facebook smell like?") are no match for a solid business plan, and after a few years of trying fruitlessly to replicate Polaroid's instant film, Kaps is ejected from his own company when a former intern becomes CEO after bringing in his own investor father.