Eliza McNitt’s immersive short film ANCESTRA, executive produced by fellow Sloan grantee Darren Aronofsky made its world premiere at the 2025 Tribeca Festival on June 13. A haunting and poetic exploration of ancestral memory, ANCESTRA blends cutting-edge technology with deeply personal narrative, inviting viewers into a sensory experience that bridges generations of women through science, myth, and memory.
McNitt is perhaps best known for her award-winning VR trilogy SPHERES. Also executive produced by Aronofsky, SPHERES made a splash after being acquired for seven-figures at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. ANCESTRA is a multi-sensory journey that uses immersive media to delve into epigenetics—the study of how trauma and memory can be passed down through generations. The film’s narrative centers on a young woman who uncovers the hidden stories of her maternal lineage, guided by the voices of her ancestors encoded in her DNA.
In 2012, McNitt won an Alfred P. Sloan Production Grant at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts for her short film WITHOUT FIRE, which follows a young Navajo girl who must find a way to heat her home in order to save her asthma-stricken mother from a bitter winter storm. The film can be streamed here on scienceandfilm.org.
ANCESTRA was developed as part of a partnership between Darren Aronofsky’s Primordial Soup and Google DeepMind, which aims to explore the potential for using generative AI as an empowering creative tool for filmmakers. In May 2025, ANCESTRA was announced as first of three short films to be produced under the partnership using DeepMind’s video generation model, Veo.
Darren Aronofsky’s own directorial efforts have embraced STEM as a lens to probe provocative existential questions. His debut feature, PI (1998), is a psychological thriller centered on a mathematician obsessed with finding patterns in the universe, blending number theory and chaos theory with mysticism. Aronofsky’s THE FOUNTAIN (2006) – which was awarded the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize at the Hamptons Film Festival delves into themes of mortality and regeneration, weaving together narratives which span centuries and touch upon neuroscience, botany, and space exploration.
Stream ANCESTRA in its entirety below.
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