
Uppercut: Gentlemen's Fight Club in Silicon Valley
A group of Silicon Valley professionals trade cubicles and Merlot bars for a boxing ring, meeting to fight for reasons that have nothing to do with competition. One member describes the tech world as home to the highest concentration of aggressive people in the country, all of it bottled up behind desks and polite conversation. The film follows these men as they organize informal bouts, train, and talk about why hitting and getting hit answers something a desk job cannot. Interviews mix with footage of sparring and fight nights, building a picture of a subculture that borrows its ethos, if not its name, from Fight Club: a deliberate return to something its members call more primitive and more basic, a way of accessing a version of masculinity that white-collar life has no room for. It stays close to its subjects rather than analyzing them from a distance, letting their own explanations carry the film.