Joybubbles

Born blind in 1949, Joe Engressia discovered as a child that he could whistle the exact tone that controlled the telephone network, and with it reach anyone, anywhere, for free. The phone became his lifeline out of a lonely childhood, and his gift made him a founding figure among the “phone phreaks,” the early hackers whose tricks would go on to inspire the blue box and the young founders of Apple.

Built almost entirely from Joe’s own voice, drawn from home recordings, tapes and speeches, alongside archival footage, Rachael J. Morrison’s debut follows him from a college campus hostile to his independence to the Twin Cities, where he renamed himself Joybubbles, declared himself forever five years old and ran phone lines offering stories and company to anyone who called. The result is a portrait of a radical life lived on his own terms, and of the connections he made one call at a time.