TRIBECA FILM INSTITUTE ANNOUNCES TFI SLOAN FILMMAKER FUND RECIPIENTS; GIVES $170,000 TO FIVE PROJECTS THAT INTEGRATE SCIENCE INTO CINEMA
TRIBECA FILM INSTITUTE ANNOUNCES TFI SLOAN FILMMAKER FUND RECIPIENTS; GIVES $170,000 TO FIVE PROJECTS THAT INTEGRATE SCIENCE INTO CINEMA
The Tribeca Film Institute (TFI) announced tonight, at an awards ceremony at City Winery for the Tribeca Film Institute, during the eighth annual Tribeca Film Festival, the selection of five film projects to receive financial and creative support from the TFI Sloan Filmmaker Fund, supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Out of 138 applications submitted, the five projects chosen will receive a total of $170,000 with development assistance and mentorship from film and science experts. The TFI Sloan Filmmaker Fund supports feature-length narrative projects that tell compelling stories about science and technology or portray scientists, engineers and mathematicians as major characters.
The projects were selected by a committee made up of Marc Abraham (Director, Flash of Genius) Dr. Bonnie Bassler (Molecular Biologist, Princeton University), Sarah Green (Producer, The Tree of Life), Famke Janssen (Actress, X-Men), Dr. Eric Kandel (Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine), Dr. Robert Engle (Nobel Prize in Economics) and John Hart (Producer, Revolutionary Road).
At the awards ceremony, Doron Weber of the Sloan Foundation and Jurors, Famke Janssen, Marc Abraham and Bonnie Bassler announced the following projects selected for funding:
COCKEYED - $40,000
BANKER TO THE POOR - $40,000
THEY’RE PLAYING BASKETBALL - $15,000
EXPERIMENTER: THE STANLEY MILGRAM STORY - $35,000
SUGAR PILL - $40,000
"Through the support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation with the TFI Sloan Filmmaker Fund, we are afforded the opportunity to provide funding at a critical time in the industry to compelling stories with scientific themes,” said Jane Rosenthal, Co-Chairman of the Board, TFI. “We welcome all of the projects selected by the committee to the Tribeca family and hope that this funding will have an impact on seeing these projects come to fruition.”
“We are delighted to join with Tribeca for the eighth year and to support these five outstanding film projects which span such a wide range of subject matter, character and genre,” said Doron Weber, Sloan Program Director. “This is one of the best crops of science films we’ve seen, demonstrating once again that science and technology offer fertile ground for filmmakers willing to dig beneath the surface and find the common human stories and passions that drive us to understand ourselves and improve our lot in the world.”
“Too often the definitive units of study, science and mathematics, are reduced to caricature in service of story when they should be an integral part,” said committee member John N. Hart.
Films funded tell stories of a team of flailing non-atletes who conquer college basketball by using an infallible mathematical formula, a Nobel Peace Prize winning economist who founds a revolutionary bank in Bangladesh to help the poorest borrowers take out micro-loans, the disturbing conclusions of Stanley Milgram’s groundbreaking obedience experiments at Yale University, an angry young man’s coming of age as a rare and incurable blindness takes over his life, and the reawakening of an emotionally paralyzed man who has made a career out of abusing the drug testing system in medical research facilities.
COCKEYED - Cockeyed by Ryan Knighton is adapted by him from his highly acclaimed memoir with the same title. The story is tough, tender, and darkly comic as Ryan crashes into life while going slowly blind, and trying to save his brother Rory from drugs, alcohol, and a really bad girlfriend. In the end Ryan finds his own way forward and a wonderful woman who makes him stronger by refusing to pity his tangled life and loss of sight.
Attachments:
Director: Jodie Foster
Screenwriter: Ryan Knighton
Producer: Jody Hotchkiss
BANKER TO THE POOR - The story of a man who fights to make his dream come true. He sets up an innovative and revolutionary bank, "the Grameen," in Bangladesh to lend tiny sums to the poorest people, without asking for guarantees. At the beginning nobody believes in him. Economists and scientists think he is a fool and will fail quickly. After 15 years, the world finally realizes his incredible invention, one of the most important of the 21st century. His invention has already saved millions of people from poverty.
Attachments:
Director: Marco Amenta
Screenwriter: Sergio Donati
THEY’RE PLAYING BASKETBALL - It's not whether you win or lose; it's how you play the game, but who says you have to play the game the way everyone else does? An experiment in equality inspires an unconventional coach and a reclusive math professor to revolutionize the game of basketball through egalitarianism and algorithms. This experiment becomes known as "The System," and it is an unyielding attack of mathematics against conventional sports wisdom - a frenzied game of ordered chaos that transforms a rag-tag team of athletic misfits into conference champions. Who needs starters when you have statistics?
Attachments:
Screenwriter/Producer: Sam Lobel
Producers: Marc Lebowitz, Kerry Barden
EXPERIMENTER: THE STANLEY MILGRAM STORY - A prismatic portrait of Stanley Milgram, Experimenter comes to terms with Stanley Milgram’s notorious obedience experiments at Yale in which he tested how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an authority figure and even though it conflicted with his strongest moral imperatives.
Attachments:
Screenwriter: Michael Almereyda
Producer: Jennifer Fox
SUGAR PILL
Two men enter a medical research facility to test a drug that has never been used in humans before. Strangers at the start, they find their lives increasingly intertwined as the physical threat to one breaks the long emotional coma of the other, and together they struggle for release--both of body and of soul.
Attachments:
Writer/Director: Lisa Krueger
Producers: Ted Hope, Anne Carey
TFI Sloan Filmmaker Fund Readings
The TFI Sloan Filmmaker Fund will present a reading of excerpts from 2009 grantee screenplays Cockeyed, Experimenter and Sugar Pill and from 2008 grantees Alva and Radioactive Boy Scout (project information to follow) on Sunday April 26th at 3:30 pm at the Helen Mills Theater, followed by a cocktail reception. This event is invitation only but is open to all TFF accredited industry. The readings will be directed by Evan Cabnet, casted by David Caparelliotis, and performed by a star cast, including Chris Abbott, Remy Auberjonois, Kate Burton, Tanya Fisher, David Harbour, and David Wilson Barnes.
The 2008 project details are as follows:
Alva
Writers: Alex Lyras, Michael Dorian
Logline: Was Thomas Edison America’s greatest inventor, or a clever thief with a pioneering acumen for marketing? Alva explores the life of Edison from a precocious young rule breaker, to the full blown ‘Wizard of Menlo Park.’
Radioactive Boy Scout
Writer/Director: Greg Harrison; Producers: Danielle Renfrew, William Horberg
Logline: Based on the true story of a 16-year-old Boy Scout in Michigan who, in 1995, attempted to build the core of a nuclear reactor in his backyard shed and was shut down by the Federal government.
Submissions for the 2010 TFI Sloan Filmmaker Fund open October 2009 and will be accepted through December 2009 (postmark deadline). Fund recipients will be announced in the spring of 2010. Visit www.tribecafilminstitute.org for further rules and information on submissions.
About the Tribeca Film Institute
The Tribeca Film Institute creates innovative programs that draw on the unifying power of film to promote understanding, tolerance and global awareness. Our commitment is to educate, entertain and inspire filmmakers and audiences alike, while strengthening the artistic and economic fabric of New York City and its Lower Manhattan community.
For more information visit www.tribecafilminstitute.org.
About the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
The New York based Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, founded in 1934, makes grants in science, technology, economics and the quality of American life. Sloan’s program in public understanding of science and technology, directed by Doron Weber, supports books, radio, film, television, theater and the Internet to reach a wide, non-specialized audience.
Sloan’s partnership with Tribeca forms part of a broader national program by the Sloan Foundation to stimulate leading artists in film, television and theater to create more realistic and compelling stories about science and technology and to challenge existing stereotypes about scientists and engineers in the popular imagination. Over the past ten years, Sloan has partnered with six of the top film schools in the country—AFI, Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, NYU, UCLA and USC—and established annual awards in screenwriting and film production. In addition to the Tribeca/Sloan Screenplay Development Program, which has initiated such film projects as Face Value, the Hedy Lamarr story, slated for shooting in January, the Foundation has sponsored screenwriting and film production workshops at Sundance, the Hamptons and Film Independent and honored new feature films such as the forthcoming Adam (Fox Searchlight) and recent films such as Flash of Genius, Sleep Dealer, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Sloan is also a longtime supporter of new science plays at the Ensemble Studio Theater and Manhattan Theater Club, of the John Adams’ opera Dr. Atomic and of the upcoming World Science Festival. For more information, please visit www.sloan.org.
