The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and NYU Tisch School of the Arts have awarded the 2025 Sloan Feature Film Prize to Benji Santayana Zusman for THE LIAR’S PARADOX, a comedic historical drama that explores one of the most consequential intellectual movements of the twentieth century. The award, which provides $150,000 in production funding, is one of the largest development prizes available to emerging filmmakers working at the intersection of science and storytelling.

Based on real events, THE LIAR’S PARADOX follows the members of the Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists who sought to create a rigorous system for distinguishing truth from falsehood in an era increasingly threatened by political extremism. Set against the backdrop of fascist Vienna in the 1930s, the film is described as a “mathematical tragicomedy” about idealists whose efforts to formalize truth helped shape the foundations of modern scientific thought.

Zusman brings an unusually interdisciplinary background to the project. A Cuban-Peruvian American filmmaker, he studied biochemistry at Harvard University, earned a medical degree from the University of Florida, conducted research at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and later pursued documentary and narrative filmmaking through fellowships including the Rockefeller Fellowship, TED Global Fellowship, and Harvard Film Study Center Fellowship. He is currently an MFA candidate at NYU Tisch’s Graduate Film program.

THE LIAR’S PARADOX continues the strong track record of Sloan-supported projects emerging from NYU. In recent years, the Sloan Feature Film Award has helped launch films that have gone on to receive recognition across the cinematic and screenwriting landscape.

Among them is SATOSHI written and directed by Sara Crow and David Rafailedes, which won NYU’s Sloan First Feature Award in 2023. The screenplay imagines an origin story for Bitcoin through the eyes of a teenage hacktivist whose experiments with cryptography lead her toward the creation of a revolutionary digital currency. Since receiving the NYU award, SATOSHI has continued to gain momentum, earning a Sundance Institute Sloan Lab Fellowship and a SFFILM Sloan Science in Cinema Fellowship, demonstrating the enduring value of Sloan’s development pipeline for science-inspired storytelling.

Another notable success story is the 2019 recipient of the prize, Nicholas Ma’s MABEL. The coming-of-age drama centers on Callie, a young girl whose fascination with botany offers a path toward connection and self-discovery. Following its festival run—including screenings through Sloan-supported programs— MABEL was released theatrically in spring 2026 and is now available on major VOD platforms including Apple TV.

With THE LIAR’S PARADOX, Zusman joins a distinguished community of filmmakers whose works illuminate science, technology, and the people behind them, charting a course toward audiences with the ongoing support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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