The 17th annual Science New Wave Festival begins October 18, bringing a slate of 64 science-focused films to venues across New York City through October 25. Since its inception in 2008, the festival has partnered with organizations across the city to bring filmmakers, scientists, and audiences together. Museum of the Moving Image has been a key partner for years, and will host the festival’s opening night this Friday. MoMI will be presenting the U.S. premiere of Sloan grantee Mark Levinson’s THE UNIVERSE IN A GRAIN OF SAND. After the screening, Levinson will be joined by filmmaker Erin Espelie and IBM’s Director of Research Dario Gil for a discussion moderated by neuroscientist Heather Berlin.
Levinson, who earned a doctoral degree in theoretical particle physics before becoming a filmmaker, earned his first Sloan film grant in 2014 for his film PARTICLE FEVER. Edited by the legendary Walter Murch, the documentary follows scientists conducting a series of groundbreaking experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. The film would go on to become an inaugural winner of the Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication in 2016.
That same year, Levinson earned back-to-back Sloan grants for another project, THE GOLD BUG VARIATIONS. In a 2016 interview with Science & Film, Levinson described the film as “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.” An adaptation of the bestselling novel by Richard Powers, the screenplay first won the 2016 Sundance Institute- Sloan Lab Fellowship and then the 2016 Film Independent Sloan Fast Track Grant. Last week, a third Sloan grant was bestowed upon the project: the film’s producer Namir Khaliq won the 2024 Film Independent Producer’s grant, earning a $30,000 prize to further develop THE GOLD BUG VARIATIONS.
Stay tuned for further developments on this Sloan-funded project and catch Levinson in person at Museum of the Moving Image this Friday, October 18 at 7pm.
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