Kyle McConaghy and Joe DeBoer know their way around the guts of an analog synthesizer. Back in their days as part of St. Louis-based band Jumping Towers, DeBoer said, “Synths would break, and we’d have to open them up and get in there.”
“We were pushing a screwdriver at the circuits and hoping something would start working,” McConaghy added, ruefully.
The filmmaking duo channeled that knowledge into South by Southwest Visions selection Dead Mail, a trip into dual obsessions in the Midwest in the mid-Eighties. First, there is Trent (John Fleck), who has dedicated his life to creating the perfect musical synthesizer. Then there are the employees at a dead letter office who dedicate their lives to getting incorrectly marked mail to its intended destination. These two compulsions – one altruistic, one twisted by mania – crash into each other in a tale of kidnapping, murder, and digital pipe organs.