By Karen A. Frenkel

On the eve before Halloween, the Imagine Science Festival culminated by bestowing the Nature Scientific Merit Award on Jessica Sharzer for The Wormhole (2002) and the Nature People’s Choice Award on Dara Bratt for In Vivid Detail (2007). Each filmmaker received a $2,500 check. These works, in which science was integral to the plot, emotionally gripped the judges and audiences. But more on that in a moment.

The ceremony and screening took place in Greenwich Village at Kenny’s Castaway’s. The event and the festival itself, however, were anything but horror-filled shipwrecks. Festival Artistic Director and Founder Alexis Gambis and Program Director Kate Jeffrey were pleased that 1,500 people attended screenings over ten days and that each venue attracted different audiences. While those at CUNY’s Graduate Center and Rockefeller University were (predictably) mainly academics, Brooklyn’s Union Hall and Pratt Institute attracted laypeople, artists, and designers. “We are trying to reach out to the public to break stereotypes and show that we’re hip and young,” Gambis told me, “We really achieved our goal of bringing science to the people.”

Nature Medicine’s Editor in Chief Juan Carlos López and a festival sponsor, and Darcy Kelley, Columbia University Professor of Neuroscience, one of the judges and a festival advisor, were on hand to present the awards. So I asked them about the criteria for the Scientific Merit Award and the judging process. “The most important element was that they be imaginative,” said Kelley. The judging committee, which also included scientist-turned-filmmaker Ari Handel and WNYC RadioLab’s Jad Abumrad, were unanimous in choosing The Wormhole.

Kelley and López agreed that few films wove together enough scientific material with good storytelling, quality filmmaking, and acting. According to Kelley and López, some films had great acting and not enough science, or poor acting supporting a great story but the filmmaking and science were inadequate.

Attendees chose In Vivid Detail after rating each film from one to five. The romantic comedy won the highest score. That film was Kelley’s second choice, but she said the other judges didn’t relate to it, and López thought it did not contain enough science.

Finding the right balance is immensely challenging and Kelley acknowledged that film shorts are a particularly difficult form. It is hard to rapidly establish an emotional connection between viewers and the characters. Since both films are under twenty minutes, the achievements are all the more noteworthy.

The Wormhole (runtime 17 minutes) tackles the emotions of a boy mourning his kidnapped brother. He wants to rewrite the past and after hearing his grandmother lecture to her class about wormholes that connect black holes to white holes, interprets the science literally to try to resolve his feelings of loss. (Personally, I think this beautiful and sensitive film deserves a prize just for depicting the grandmother as a cosmologist.) In Vivid Detail (runtime 18 minutes) explores the impact on a budding romance of a man’s childhood brain injury. He suffers from prosopagnosia, which prevents him from recognizing faces. At first his girlfriend is skeptical that he really has this neurological disorder, but then struggles to understand and accept it.

Unfortunately, both award-winning directors were out of town. Accepting for The Wormhole, composer Christopher Libertino commented that there is “lots of crosstalk between the arts and sciences” and expressed thanks for the festival. Bratt’s husband Kieran Dick and also the writer, accepted for In Vivid Detail and quipped “I thank Nature and nature in general.” Because they were absent last night, I couldn’t ask the directors (who both happen to by NYU film school graduates) about the way they presented science or the amount, their decision-making process, or why they felt compelled to make a film including science at all. Maybe that will be my next blog.

So in the meantime, let me ask your opinion of Carl Djerassi’s thoughts on this topic. In his essay, “Contemporary Science-in-theatre: A Rare Genre,” Djerassi, inventor of the birth control pill, author and playwright, comments, “The moment many scientifically illiterate persons learn that some scientific facts are about to be sprung on them, they raise a mental shield. It is those people—the ascientific or even antiscientific—that I wanted to touch through the medium of fiction.” But he says a few sentences later, “Open admission of a desire for pedagogic smuggling immediately raises the warning flag associated with the charged term ‘didactic.’ ”

He shows us that this dilemma is as old as the hills, pointing to the Roman poet Horace. He argued 2000 years ago in Ars Poetica for delighting the reader at the same time as instructing him. Djerassi says that although many use the word didactic pejoratively, according to Webster’s Dictionary it really means, “intended to convey instruction and information, as well as pleasure and entertainment.” (Djerassi’s italics). “So what is wrong,” he asks, “with learning something while being entertained?” See: http://www.djerassi.com/sciencetheatre.html

OK, Halloween, with its costumes and masks, is over. But we can still haunt those anti-science spirits with some lively discussion. Why do you think that today we feel we must disguise science instruction within entertainment? People like the luxury of air conditioning, the convenience of computers, and love their iPods, but somehow don’t want to understand the science fundamental to applied technology. Are we experiencing the death of curiosity about our universe? Why do many people stigmatize scientific investigators? What do you think has happened to our society over the centuries resulting in this change? Looking forward to your thoughts.