Park City, Utah - At the 2021 Sundance Film Festival today, the beneficiaries of $70,000 in grants from Sundance Institute and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation were named. Doron Weber, Vice President and Program Director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, presented the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize to Son of Monarchs and announced the new winners: Tania Taiwo for Pharmacopeia (Sundance Institute | Sloan Commissioning Grant); Alyssa Loh for Chariot (Sundance Institute | Sloan Development Fellowship); and Jennifer Lee and Graham Sack for The Harvard Computers (Sundance Institute | Sloan Episodic Fellowship). Alexis Gambis's Son of Monarchs will receive a $20,000 check as part of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Feature Film Prize, as previously announced.
More information about the 2021 awardees is available on the Festival's digital platform. These activities are part of the Sundance Institute Science-in-Film Initiative, which is made possible by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
The world has been uniquely preoccupied with science for the last year, and it's clearer than ever that it has crucial implications for our culture said Keri Putnam, Executive Director of Sundance Institute, The Sloan Foundation has always recognized that artfully-told stories about science, technology and human engagement have the power to advance our understanding and imaginations.
In this plague-ridden year that has shuttered so much of our lives but not our imaginations or our creative output, we are thrilled to continue Sloan's 19-year partnership with Sundance Institute by honoring Alexis Gambis's Son of Monarchs as our juried feature film prize winner and by supporting three exciting new screenwriters, said Doron Weber, Vice President and Program Director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. All this year's winning projects portray underrepresented figures in conflict with their environment who turn to science in one form or another. Gambis's beautiful, poetic film depicts an immigrant scientist's effort to understand nature and his own family past as he crosses boundaries of time, nationality and species. Our three winning scripts and teleplays tells the tales, respectively, of a Black pharmacist who becomes a drug dealer to support herself (Pharmacopeia); brilliant but marginalized women who defied sexism and discrimination to become astronomers (The Harvard Computers); and the 1958 plan to use nuclear weapons to blast a new harbor among the indigenous population of Alaska (Chariot). These winners along with dozens more from other film partners across the country show that science does not just makes for great storytelling and great characters, but it can help us better understand the world around us and we ignore it at our peril.
The nineteen-year partnership between the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Sundance Institute forms part of the Sloan Foundation's nationwide Film Program, which includes support for 12 film schools and seven screenwriting development partners and has resulted in over 30 completed feature films. In addition to Hidden Figures, originally supported by a Sloan book grant, the film program has long championed stories about women in science from Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story to stories about Louise Pearce, Rosalind Franklin, Marie Curie, Lise Meitner and Jane Goodall. The program has also supported many works about the role of technology in daily life, including the impact of machine learning, robotics and artificial intelligence. Sloan has supported feature narrative films such as Adventures of a Mathematician, One Man Dies a Million Times, The Sound of Silence, To Dust, The Catcher Was a Spy, The Man Who Knew Infinity, The Imitation Game, Experimenter, and Operator, along with documentaries, such as the 2020 Sundance Film Festival selection Coded Bias and several new projects, including episodic television, in development. The program has also given early recognition to stand-out films such as Ammonite, The Aeronauts, First Man, Searching, The Martian, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind and Tesla, last year's recipient of the Feature Film Prize.
Son of Monarchs: Winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize
Son of Monarchs has been awarded the 2021 Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize and received a $20,000 cash award from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The Prize is selected by a jury of film and science professionals and presented to an outstanding feature film focusing on science or technology as a theme, or depicting a scientist, engineer or mathematician as a major character, and will be recognized at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival closing Awards Night.
The 2021 Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize Jury was named on January 22, 2021 and includes Joy Buolamwini (founder, Algorithmic Justice League) Aneesh Chaganty (writer/director, Searching, 2018 Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize winner), Dr. Mand Holford (associate professor of chemistry, Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York), Lydia Dean Pilcher (director, A Call to Spy), and Lena Vurma (producer, Adventures of a Mathematician).
The jury stated, For its poetic, multilayered portrait of a scientist's growth and self-discovery as he migrates between Mexico and New York City working on transforming nature and uncovers the fluid boundaries that unite past and present and all living things, the 2021 Sloan Feature Film Prize at the Sundance Festival goes to Alexis Gambis's Son of Monarchs.
Son of Monarchs / Mexico, U.S.A. (Director and Screenwriter: Alexis Gambis, Producers: Abraham Dayan, Maria Altamirano) - After his grandmother's death, a Mexican biologist living in New York returns to his hometown, nestled in the majestic monarch butterfly forests of Michoac n. The journey forces him to confront past traumas
