Sundance Institute Announces $60,000 in Sloan Science in Cinema Awards

Park City, UT - Sundance Institute announced today awards for the most promising new independent films about science and technology, including Embrace of the Serpent directed by Ciro Guerraas the recipient of the Sloan Science-in Film-Prize at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. Mark Levinson (The Gold Bug Variations) has been awarded the Sundance Institute / Sloan Fellowship, and Darcy Brislin and Dyana Winkler (Bell) will receive Sundance Institute / Sloan Commissioning Grants.

These activities, as well as a panel at the Festival, are part of the Sundance Institute Science-in-Film Initiative, which is made possible by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The initiative supports the development and exhibition of independent films about science or technology, or depicting a scientist, engineer or mathematician as a major character. Both the Commissioning Grant and Fellowship, presented through the Institute's Feature Film Program, provide a cash award to support further development of a screenplay and to retain science advisors, along with overall creative and strategic feedback throughout development.

Films previously supported by the initiative include The Stanford Prison Experiment, I Origins, Computer Chess, Robot & Frank, Valley of Saints, Another Earth, Obselidia, Adam, Sleep Dealer, Dark Matter, House of Sand, Grizzly Man, Primer and Dopamine.

New this year, the Institute will add a Fellowship for a writer with an early-stage episodic project to support its development for television.

Keri Putnam, Executive Director of Sundance Institute, said, Our Science-in-Film Initiative with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation shines a spotlight on the scientists and technologists who move our culture forward. Building on our work in independent film, our new Fellowship for a science-based episodic project will help bring an early-stage TV or online series to the small screen.

Doron Weber, Vice President, Programs at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation said, We are delighted to recognize Ciro Guerras poetic work Embrace the Serpent as the winner of the 2016 Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. This beautiful film depicts the scientist as unconventional explorer and an encounter between two cultures that leads to a deeper understanding of nature and new scientific knowledge, research which continues to this day. In a year with such fine Oscar-nominated films as The Martian, Steve Jobs and Joy, Embrace of the Serpent shows how the boldest and most gifted filmmakers continue to find innovative ways of telling stories with scientific themes and characters.

Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize

Embrace of the Serpent, directed by Ciro Guerra, has been awarded the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival and will receive a $20,000 cash award from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. This blistering, poetic story is inspired by the original journals of scientists Theodor Koch-Gr nberg and Richard Evans Schultes, who meet lone survivor Karamakate, an Amazonian shaman. Over 40 years, they develop a friendship while traveling through the Colombian Amazon in search of the sacred, psychedelic yakruna plant. Cast: Jan Bijvoet, Brionne Davis, Antonio Bolivar, Nilbio Torres, Miguel Dionisio Ramos.

The Prize is selected by a jury of film and science professionals: theatre, film, and television actor Kerry Bish ; writer, director and producer, Mike Cahill; filmmaker, Shane Carruth; professor at University of Southern California, Clifford Johnson; and professor of genetics at Harvard, director of space genetics, and director of the Personal Genetics Education Project, Ting Wu.

The jury presented the award to the film for its original and provocative portrait of a scientist and a scientific journey into the unknown, and for its unconventional depiction of how different cultures seek to understand nature.

Sundance Institute / Sloan Fellowship

Mark Levinson will receive a $15,000 cash award from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation at this year's Sundance Film Festival.

The Gold Bug Variations (U.S.A.) / Mark Levinson (Writer/Director)

The Gold Bug Variations is a double helix of two love stories spiraling across 25 years and the mysterious disappearance of a scientist on the verge of understanding the code for life, but derailed by the search for the code for love. Script based on the novel by Richard Powers.

After first getting a doctoral degree in theoretical particle physics, Mark Levinson began his film career as an assistant editor on the feature film Smooth Talk. He developed his writing and directing skills as an ADR Supervisor on films such as The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Cold Mountain and The Rainmaker. Levinson wrote, produced and directed the narrative feature Prisoner of Time, which had an acclaimed premiere at the Moscow International Film Festival. Most recently, he directed the award-winning documentary feature Particle Fever about the discovery of the Higgs boson, the so-called God Particle.

Sundance Institute / Sloan Commissioning Grant

The grantees will each receive a $12,500 cash award from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Bell (U.S.A.) / Darcy Brislin and Dyana Winkler (Co-Writers)

From the controversy surrounding his invention of the telephone, to his lesser known work with eugenics and the deaf, this is the true story of famed inventor Alexander Graham Bell, whose quest for love changed the course of history, for better and for much worse.

For nearly a decade, Dyana Winkler worked full time supporting filmmakers at Sundance Institute and the Tribeca Film Institute before she dove headfirst into life as a freelance filmmaker in Brooklyn, NY. Currently, Winkler is co-directing/producing the feature length documentary, United Skates, which follows an underground subculture growing inside our country'

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