TFI Sloan Filmmaker Fund Kicks Off with Works in Progress Presentation
The TFI Sloan Filmmaker Fund kicked off its festival events last Thursday with a “work in progress” presentation of 2010’s award-winning films. The morning was in many ways the opposite of Saturday’s big Sloan event, the 10th anniversary screening of Memento, showcasing five films in the script development stage and one currently seeking distribution. The good people at TFI Sloan gathered a theatrical director and cast of seven to play out selected scenes from the scripts, giving other grant winners and various industry folks a chance to see what the fund has been up to this year. It was great to see Ann Dowd, Anson Mount, and other fine actors doing their thing in person. Imagine watching the recording of an audiobook live and you’ll get a sense of what it was like. (Unless you don’t think that sounds like fun, in which case imagine something you do enjoy).
The TFI Sloan partnership provides grant money to films that realistically portray science and / or scientists, helping to correct Hollywood’s notoriously poor grasp of the subject. Though that all sounds great on paper, “works in progress” embodied the ideal union between science and filmmaking in a palpable way. We were fortunate to have two of the scientists from the grant selection committee in attendance and seeing them mingle with the grantees fully revealed the intellectual compatibility of filmmakers and scientists. Watching a screenwriter have a lengthy discussion of his film’s scientific accuracy with a Nobel Prize winning biologist, we couldn’t be more proud of the program and our grantees. Though all the projects generated immense excitement from the industry representatives and grantees themselves, perhaps the most exciting endorsement came from Susan Casey. Casey’s book about her experience among sharks and the people who love them was the adaptation source of one project, and she took in stride the potentially bizarre experience of watching an actor portray a true event from her own life.
Seeing their scripts come to life, we imagine the Sloan filmmakers had the same thought we at Tribeca had entering the first weekend of the festival: this just got real.
PS: Check out our completely awesome grantees in detail
-Alex Kopecky
