Science and Sundance
One of the growing missions of the Sundance Institute is the encouragement of movies about science - due largely to the sponsorship of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Thanks to the Sloan Foundation, the Sundance Film Festival now gives a $20,000 prize to a movie that spotlights science and technology, or features a scientist, engineer or mathematician as a major character. (This once prompted writer-actress Guinevere Turner, at a Sundance awards-night ceremony, to dispense this advice to filmmakers: "Dude, stick a robot in your movie - this is $20,000.")
Today, the Sundance Institute announced a commissioning grant and a fellowship to filmmakers for their science-themed projects.
The grant, of $25,000, goes to filmmaker Michael Almereyda, for his film "The Stanley Milgram Project," which profiles the Yale professor whose studies of human behavior in the 1960s showed how people could - when following orders from authority figures - inflict serious pain on other people. (The studies were cited in documentaries about the Abu Ghraib torture scandal.) Almereyda has been at the festival before, with the vampire drama "Nadja" (1994) and his modern take of "Hamlet" (2000).
The fellowship goes to Ryan Knighton for his screenplay "Cockeyed," based on his memoir of his life as a punk rocker and poet - and the unexpected onset of blindness due to retinitis pigmentosa. Knighton workshopped his script at this January's Sundance Screenwriters' Lab.
Thanks to the Sloan Foundation, the Sundance Film Festival now gives a $20,000 prize to a movie that spotlights science and technology, or features a scientist, engineer or mathematician as a major character. (This once prompted writer-actress Guinevere Turner, at a Sundance awards-night ceremony, to dispense this advice to filmmakers: "Dude, stick a robot in your movie - this is $20,000.")
Today, the Sundance Institute announced a commissioning grant and a fellowship to filmmakers for their science-themed projects.
The grant, of $25,000, goes to filmmaker Michael Almereyda, for his film "The Stanley Milgram Project," which profiles the Yale professor whose studies of human behavior in the 1960s showed how people could - when following orders from authority figures - inflict serious pain on other people. (The studies were cited in documentaries about the Abu Ghraib torture scandal.) Almereyda has been at the festival before, with the vampire drama "Nadja" (1994) and his modern take of "Hamlet" (2000).
The fellowship goes to Ryan Knighton for his screenplay "Cockeyed," based on his memoir of his life as a punk rocker and poet - and the unexpected onset of blindness due to retinitis pigmentosa. Knighton workshopped his script at this January's Sundance Screenwriters' Lab.
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