Since 1986, a small, erudite cult has met weekly in Zurich. The group is currently making their third lap through James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, one of the literary canon’s most notorious texts. Carefully reading aloud with frequent pauses for analysis, they slowly weave their way through Joyce’s labyrinth, line for line, word for word. In The Joycean Society, filmmaker Dora Garcia offers us a seat at the table, making us a party to the group’s excavation of the meanings, allusions, and cross-references buried in Joyce’s wordplay and digressions. The group’s decades-spanning quest is made manifest in potent images of notebooks overflowing with obsessive scribblings and loose pages adorned with microscopic marginalia. Garcia’s rigorous approach yields a surprising amount of fun, as the self-aware readers talk through insights both profound and ridiculous, and reflect on the impossibility of knowing the difference. Plays with “Hacked Circuit” (dir. Deborah Stratman, 15 min.). (DS)