Jun 14, 2024
What is the SFFILM Sloan Science on Screen Award?
This annual award carries a $5,000 cash prize and celebrates the compelling depiction of scientific themes or characters in a narrative feature film. The 2024 program included a lively onstage conversation featuring the film’s cast and crew, and Noah Whiteman, an evolutionary biologist and Professor of Genetics, Genomics, Evolution and Development at the University of California Berkeley. On the Invention of Species follows Carla, while on the cusp of womanhood and grappling with the loss of her brother, finds herself adrift on the historic archipelago that led to Charles Darwin’s breakthrough studies on adaptation.
SFFILM’s partnership with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation—the nation’s leading philanthropic grantor for science and the arts—culminates in the SFFILM Sloan Science in Cinema Initiative. Launched in 2015, the program celebrates and highlights cinema that brings together science and the art of storytelling, showing how these two seemingly disparate areas can combine to enhance the power of one another. The selections are meant to immerse a broad public audience in the challenges and rewards of scientific discovery, as well as to engage members of the scientific community.
Watch the full conversation to hear about the making of On the Invention of Species.
SFFILM Sloan Science on Screen Award Conversation
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