Sloan Science on Screen Prize: “BlackBerry”
Description
The person who puts a computer inside a phone will change the world,” avers company founder Mike Lazaridis (impeccably played by Jay Baruchel) in Matt Johnson’s exuberant depiction of the rise and fall of BlackBerry. The film begins in 1996 with the founding of a small Canadian company focused on using quantum science to provide secure communications and mobile productivity resulting in the launch of a handheld device that soon took the world by storm … until competitors took the technology one step further. Johnson’s film perfectly captures the heady creative period of the mid-’90s as groups of nerdy engineers and innovators gorging on snacks and sci-fi flicks intersect with the high-powered and demanding world of financiers and venture capitalists. The terrific supporting cast includes Cary Elwes, Michael Ironside, and Rich Sommer. This year’s winner of the Sloan Science on Screen Award. Expected Guests: Director Matt Johnson, and cast
Trailer
Biographies
Canadian writer/director/actor Matt Johnson burst forth as a feature director in 2013 with The Dirties, winning the best film prize at Austin Fantastic Fest and the grand jury best narrative feature award and the Spirit of Slamdance Award at the Slamdance Film Festival. For his second feature, the mockumentary Operation Avalanche (2016), he infiltrated NASA. BlackBerry is his third feature.
Joel Moore is Chern-Simons Professor of Physics at UC Berkeley and a senior faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. His theoretical work seeks to explain how electrons in solids combine to produce a variety of remarkable and useful properties with applications ranging from quantum computing to energy-efficient electronics. He is an elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences (2022) and fellow of the American Physical Society (2013). He previously served as a Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics founded by Mike Lazaridis of BlackBerry fame. He received his Ph.D. from MIT in 2001 and joined UC Berkeley and LBNL in 2002 after a postdoctoral position at Bell Labs.