Franke Program in Science & the Humanities

In addition to being the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne and the only person ever to have won Nobel Prizes in both physics and chemistry, Marie Curie welcomed other women into her lab. It was her lab from the untimely death of her husband, Pierre, in 1906, till her own death in 1934. She ran it, enlarged it, moved it into the imposing new Radium Institute, and peopled it with an international assembly of scientists, more than forty of whom were women, including her daughter Irène, the second woman to win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Dava Sobel is a former reporter for the New York Times and the author of Longitude, Galileo’s Daughter, The Planets, A More Perfect Heaven, The Glass Universe, and, most recently, The Elements of Marie Curie. She initiated and edits the “Meter” poetry column in Scientific American.

Poster

This film tells the tale of an adolescent girl who grew up in an “unseeable” Dalit caste group in southern India whose forced occupation is to wash clothes of other Dalits, the dead, and menstruating women.  She transcends her lot and becomes immortalized as their local deity, Maadathy.

The screening will be followed by a conversation with the filmmaker, Leena Manimekalai, a leading Tamil poet and award-winning filmmaker. With a strong repertoire of films with an impressive exhibition record covering over 100 international film festivals, she is an interventionist, and her forte is participatory filmmaking. Her tryst with censorship, both constitutional and extra constitutional, as a brown queer female body, as a poet, and as a politically unapologetic filmmaker is itself a metanarrative in her journey as an artist. She has an M.F.A. in film from York University and is currently teaching undergraduate students in the Department of Visual Studies, University of Toronto, Mississauga.

Co-sponsored by the Whitney Humanities Center and Yale MacMillan South Asian Studies Council

Hummingbird weaves together the incredible stories of five individuals with life-changing Rare Genetic Diseases. Their inspirational experiences and journeys are illuminated in this 30-minute documentary film, which combines cutting-edge scientific research with critical advocacy in one accessible, engaging package. With topics ranging from music therapy to bone marrow registries, to anti-sense oligonucleotides, Hummingbird is a uniquely comprehensive look at the experiences of those living with a Rare Genetic Disease, and what we can learn from them.

Adrien Rolet is a graduating Yale senior who uses his love for storytelling to explore the inner workings of scientific practice. Originally from the United Kingdom, he has spent the last six years making documentaries around the world on a range of subjects, from ecological conservation to vaccine denial. A Franke Undergraduate Fellow, he created Hummingbird as a joint thesis project in Molecular Biology and Film Studies.

Built by the US government to house the Hanford nuclear site workers who manufactured weapons-grade plutonium for the Manhattan Project, Richland, Washington is proud of its heritage as a nuclear company town and proud of the atomic bomb it helped create. Richland offers a prismatic, placemaking portrait of a community staking its identity and future on its nuclear origin story, presenting a timely examination of the habits of thought that normalize the extraordinary violence of the past. Moving between archival past and observational present, and across encounters with nuclear workers, community members, archeologists, local tribes, and a Japanese granddaughter of atomic bomb survivors, the film blooms into an expansive and lyrical meditation on home, safety, whiteness, land, and deep time.

Irene Lusztig is a feminist filmmaker, archival researcher, educator, and amateur seamstress. She works in a space of delicate mediation between people, their pasts, and the present-tense spaces and landscapes where unresolved histories bloom and erupt. Often beginning with rigorous research in archives, her work brings historical materials into conversation with the present, inviting viewers to contemplate questions of politics, ideology, and the complex ways that personal, collective, and national memory are entangled. Her work has been screened around the world, including at the Berlinale, MoMA, Film Society of Lincoln Center, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Anthology Film Archives, Pacific Film Archive, Flaherty NYC, IDFA Amsterdam, Hot Docs, AFI Docs, BFI London Film Festival, Melbourne Film Festival, DocLisboa, and RIDM Montréal. She has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim (2021), the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Fulbright, two MacDowell fellowships, the Flaherty Film Seminar, and the Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship.

Learn more

Film screening of My Octopus Teacher and post-film moderated conversation with Pippa Ehrlich, co-director of the film

A filmmaker forges an unusual friendship with an octopus living in a South African kelp forest, learning as the animal shares the mysteries of her world.

Pippa Ehrlich is the co-writer, editor, and director of My Octopus Teacher—South Africa’s first Netflix Original documentary. For the last five years, she has been a part of the Sea Change Project, exploring the underwater forests of Cape Town, directing the film, and editing the Sea Change book. The film has garnered attention from celebrities, conservationists, and scientists all over the world; has been nominated for an Oscar; and has already received more than 20 international awards, including the prestigious Wildscreen Golden Panda, Jackson Wild’s Grand Teton, the IDA’s Pare Lorentz, the PGA for best Documentary Motion Picture, and a BAFTA.

Before joining Sea Change, Pippa worked as an environmental journalist, specializing in marine science and conservation and the intersection between people and the natural world. She has worked with some of the world’s top marine researchers and underwater photographers and has been an avid freediver for more than a decade.