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Science, Technology and Society
Director: Julia Newman
Albert Einstein was a world renowned celebrity, greeted like a rock star whenever he appeared in public. He was an outspoken social and political activist, an anti-war firebrand who was on the right side of controversial issues like women's rights, racism and nuclear arms control. He warned the world early on that Hitler was intent on war and the destruction of the Jewish people and was strategic and effective in helping to rescue Jews from the Nazis before World War II.
He referred to his fellow Jews as "my Jewish brethren" and wrote "The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, an almost fanatical love of justice, and the desire for personal independence - these are the features of the Jewish tradition which make me thank my lucky stars that I belong to it."
In the 65 years since his death his fiery image has been neutered into that of a charmingly unworldly genius, preoccupied with the rarefied world of physics. Filmmaker Julia Newman, whose earlier film, "Into the Fire," explored how American women joined "the good fight" against the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War, here goes beyond the legend to tell the inspiring and true story of the 20th Century's most famous savant. Using a wealth of rarely seen archival footage, letters to and from Einstein, and new and illuminating interviews, Albert Einstein: Still a Revolutionary shows us a man who, while celebrated for revealing some of the fundamental laws governing our universe, was a true humanitarian; a man who believed in always doing the right thing.
DVD / 2020 / 80 minutes
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By Shalini Kantayya
When MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini discovers that most facial-recognition software misidentifies women and darker-skinned faces, she delves into an investigation of widespread bias in algorithms.
When MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini discovers that most facial-recognition software misidentifies women and darker-skinned faces, she is compelled to investigate further. It turns out that artificial intelligence, which was defined by a homogeneous group of men, is not neutral. What Buolamwini learns about widespread bias in algorithms drives her to push the U.S. government to create the first-ever legislation to counter the far-reaching dangers of bias in a technology that is steadily encroaching on our lives.
Centering on the voices of women leading the charge to ensure our civil rights are protected, Coded Bias asks two key questions: what is the impact of Artificial Intelligence's increasing role in governing our liberties? And what are the consequences for people stuck in the crosshairs due to their race, color, and gender?
DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2020 / 90 minutes
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Directed by Joni Siani
An examination of our love/hate relationships with our digital devices from the first digitally socialized generation, and what we can do about it.
In one short decade, we have totally changed the way we interact with one another. The millennial generation, the first to be socialized in a digital world, is now feeling the unintended consequences.
CELLING YOUR SOUL is a powerful and informative examination of how our young people actually feel about connecting in the digital world and their love/hate relationship with technology. It provides empowering strategies for more fulfilling, balanced, and authentic human interaction within the digital landscape.
The film reveals the effects of "digital socialization" by taking viewers on a personal journey with a group of high school and college students who through a digital cleanse discover the power of authentic human connectivity, and that there is "No App" or piece of technology that can ever replace the benefits of human connection.
DVD / 2017 / (Grades 6-12, College, Adult) / 48 minutes
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Directed by Judith Pyke
A clinical research trial at the Personalized OncoGenomics Program is changing the way scientists think about the future of cancer care.
Six years ago Zuri Scrivens, the mother of a toddler, was very ill with incurable breast cancer that had spread to her liver and lymph nodes. Today Zuri has no signs of cancer, not because of a miraculous new cancer drug, but thanks to a diabetes medication.
CRACKING CANCER follows a group of patients with incurable cancer on a trailblazing journey through a highly experimental clinical trial at the BC Cancer Agency in Vancouver called POG -- Personalized OncoGenomics.
The trial compares patients' normal DNA -- each cell's complete set of instructions -- with that of their tumors, to find the genetic mutations causing their cancer. Zuri's cancer driver was a mutation that caused a very high growth factor. The team plowed through decades of data to isolate which drug in all of medicine, not just cancer, might block that growth factor. They zeroed in on a diabetes medication. Zuri received the drug and standard hormone treatment. Within 5 months, her cancer became undetectable.
POG offers a radical new way of treating cancer, not according to where it originates in the body, but rather as a disease of genetic mutations. Thousands more will join the trial, all hoping for their own salvation, all helping science to crack the cancer code.
DVD / 2017 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adults) / 44 minutes
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Directed by Stephanie Welch
Examines the history of the US eugenics movement and its recent resurrection, which uses false scientific claims and holds that an all-powerful "gene" determines who is worthy and who is not.
There is a dangerous idea that has threatened the American Dream from the very beginning. It is a strong current of biological determinism which views some groups, races and individuals as inherently superior to others and more deserving of fundamental rights. Despite the founders' assertion that "all are created equal," this idea was used to justify disenfranchising women, blacks and Native Americans from the earliest days of the Republic.
A DANGEROUS IDEA: GENETICS, EUGENICS AND THE AMERICAN DREAM reveals how this dangerous idea gained new traction in the 20th century with an increasing belief in the concept of an all-powerful "gene" that predetermines who is worthy and who is not. The film reveals how this new genetic determinism provided an abhorrent rationale for state sanctioned crimes committed against America's poorest, most vulnerable citizens and for violations of the fundamental civil rights of untold millions.
Featuring interviews with social thinkers including Van Jones and Robert Reich as well as prominent scientists in many fields, A DANGEROUS IDEA is a radical reassessment of the meaning, use and misuse of gene science. Like no other film before it, this documentary brings to light how false scientific claims have rolled back long fought for gains in equality, and how powerful interests are poised once again to use the gene myth to unravel the American Dream.
DVD / 2017 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adult) / 106 minutes
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By Gina Hara
Nerdy women - the "hidden half" of fan culture - open up about their lives in the world of conventions, video games, and other rife-with-misogyny pop culture touchstones. While geek communities have recently risen to prominence, very little attention is paid to geek women. Filmmaker Gina Hara, struggling with her own geek identity, explores the issue with a cast of women who live geek life up to the hilt: A feminist geek blogger, a convention-trotting cosplayer, a professional gamer, a video-game designer, and a NASA engineer. Through their personal experiences in the rich cultural explosion of nerdom, GEEK GIRLS shows both the exhilaration of newfound community and the ennui of being ostracized. These women, striving in their respective professions and passions, face the cyberbullying, harassment, and sexism that permeate the culture and the industry at large. A rich conversation-starter for any class on Pop Culture and Feminism.
DVD (Color) / 2017 / 83 minutes
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Directed by Noel Dockstader, Quinn Kanaly
Documents the journey of the Solar Impulse - the first solar-powered, round-the-world flight - demonstrating the tremendous potential of renewable energy sources.
Soaring at 28,000 feet without a drop of fuel, nothing is predictable. Not the weather, not the technology. And certainly not the fate of a man, alone for five days in a fragile, first-of-its-kind aircraft with nothing but ocean below.
POINT OF NO RETURN takes viewers behind the headlines of the first solar-powered flight around the world, where two courageous pilots take turns battling nature, their own crew, and sometimes logic itself, to achieve the impossible. Not just to make history, but to inspire a revolution.
DVD / 2017 / (Grades 7-9, College, Adults) / 95 minutes
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Directors: Sean Blacknell, Wayne Walsh
In this provocative documentary, worldwide experts in the fields of futurology, anthropology, neuroscience and philosophy consider the impact of technological advances on the two certainties of human life: work and death.
Charting human developments from early man, past the Industrial Revolution, to the digital age and beyond, The Future of Work and Death looks at the astonishing exponential rate at which mankind creates technologies to ease the process of living. As we embark on the next phase of our 'advancement,' with automation and artificial intelligence driving the transformation from man to machine, the film gives a shockingly realistic look into the future of human life.
Featuring a host of knowledgeable but endearingly eccentric experts including author Will Self, futurist Gray Scott, transhumanist Zoltan Istvan, and neuroscientist Rudolph Tanzi, The Future of Work and Death is profoundly insightful, often surprising, and always engaging.
DVD / 2016 / 89 minutes
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By Kathy Kleiman, Jon Palfreman and Kate McMahon
In the United States, women are vastly underrepresented in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Math) fields, holding under 25% of STEM jobs and a disproportionately low share of STEM undergraduate degrees. Great Unsung Women of Computing is a series of three remarkable documentary films that show how women revolutionized the computing and Internet technology we use today, inspiring female students to believe that programming careers lie within their grasp.
The Computers features the extraordinary story of the ENIAC Programmers, six young women who programmed the world's first modern, programmable computer, ENIAC, as part of a secret WWII project. They programmed ENIAC without programming language (for none existed), and harnessed its power to perform advanced military calculations at lighting speeds. However, when the ENIAC was unveiled in 1946, the Programmers were never introduced and they became invisible. This stunning documentary features rare footage and never-before-seen interviews with the ENIAC Programmers. 70 years later, this is their story.
The Coders tells the story of two extraordinary women, Sarah Allen and Pavni Diwanji whose technologies revolutionized the Internet: Sarah co-invented Flash, the first multimedia platform supporting video, graphics, games and animation for the internet, while Pavni invented the Java servlet to allow web applications to respond quickly to requests from users everywhere.
In The Future Makers, Andrea Colaco, a young MIT PhD, shares her dream of a world in which we interact with our smart devices using natural hand gestures, not static keyboards or touchpads. She invented 3D "gestural recognition technology" and co-founded 3dim to develop and market it. In 2013, 3dim won MIT's $100K Entrepreneurship Prize and launched Andrea towards her dream of innovation and changing the world.
DVD (Color) / 2016 / 48 minutes
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Director: Donald Rayne Mitchell
The 20th century was a dangerous time to be young: a multitude of diseases too often kept children from reaching even their teenage years. Millions suffered and died. From that environment one man would emerge to lead a revolution in vaccine innovation that would save many millions of young lives every year; the greatest scientist of the 20th century, and no one knows his name.
Maurice Hilleman had a singular, unwavering focus: to eliminate the diseases of children. From his poverty-stricken youth on the plains of Montana, Hilleman came to prevent pandemic flu, invent the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine, and develop the first-ever vaccine against human cancer. Responsible for more than half of the vaccines children receive today, he is credited with saving more than eight million lives every year. Now through exclusive interviews with Dr. Hilleman and his peers, rare archival footage, and 3-D animation, this documentary puts a human face to vaccine science, revealing the character that drove this bold, complex, and heroic man.
When parents began choosing not to vaccinate their children in the 1990s, a cruel irony became clear; Hilleman's unprecedented successes have allowed us to forget just how devastating childhood diseases can be.
DVD / 2016 / 67 minutes
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Directed by Bruce Mohun
Scientists are hunting urgently for new antibiotics - a challenge that is taking them to some remote and unusual places.
Increasing resistance to antibiotics has been called the most pressing global health problem of our time. Medical experts are predicting a post-antibiotic era, in which people will die of infections easily treated just a few years ago -- unless we find more of these miracle drugs.
THE ANTIBIOTIC HUNTERS follows drug researchers as they investigate the slimy green fur of sloths, the saliva of Komodo dragons, the blood of alligators, and the bacteria in British Columbia caves and on the ocean floor off the coast of Panama -- all part of the urgent hunt to find the building blocks of new antibiotics.
DVD / 2015 / (Grades 7-12, College, Adult) / 44 minutes
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Directed by Sue Williams
Debunks the notion that electronics is a 'clean' industry by revealing the human and environmental cost of electronic gadgets that are designed to die.
Consumers love - and live on - their smartphones, tablets and laptops. A cascade of new devices pours endlessly into the market, promising even better communication, non-stop entertainment and instant information. The numbers are staggering. By 2020, four billion people will have a personal computer. Five billion will own a mobile phone.
But this revolution has a dark side that the electronics industry doesn't want you to see.
In an investigation that spans the globe, award-winning filmmaker Sue Williams investigates the underbelly of the international electronics industry and reveals how even the tiniest devices have deadly environmental and health costs.
DEATH BY DESIGN tells the stories of young Chinese workers laboring in unsafe conditions, American families living with the tragic consequences of the industry's toxic practices, activists leading the charge to hold brands accountable, and passionate entrepreneurs who are developing more sustainable products and practices to safeguard our planet and our future.
From the intensely secretive electronics factories in China, to the high tech innovation labs of Silicon Valley, DEATH BY DESIGN tells a story of environmental degradation, of health tragedies, and the fast-approaching tipping point between consumerism and sustainability.
DVD / 2015 / (Grades 7-9, College, Adults) / 73 minutes
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Director: Beeban Kidron
InRealLife asks what exactly is the internet and what is it doing to our children? Taking us on a journey from the bedrooms of teenagers to Silicon Valley, filmmaker Beeban Kidron suggests that rather than the promise of free and open connectivity, young people are increasingly ensnared in a commercial world. Beguiling and glittering on the outside, it can be alienating and addictive. Quietly building its case, Kidron's film asks if we can afford to stand by while our children, trapped in their 24/7 connectivity, are being outsourced to the net?
While newspapers alternately praise and panic about the glittering world of the Internet, there is a generation of children who have grown up with a smart phone in their hand, connected to the world 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Public discourse seems to revolve around privacy, an issue that embodies the fears and concerns of adults. What is less discussed is what it really means to always be online, never alone and increasingly bombarded by a world that has something to sell you and appears to know you better than yourself. A world that is so ubiquitous that it is the first thing you see as you wake up in the morning and the last thing you see before you go to sleep at night.
For adults there was a 'before' the net. But for the current generation, at the time of their most rapid development they have no other experience and few tools with which to negotiate the overwhelming parade of opportunity and cost that the internet delivers directly into their hands.
From the bedrooms of five disparate teenagers and then into the companies that profit from the internet, InRealLifetakes a closer look at some of the behavioral outcomes that come from living in a commercially driven, 'interruption' culture.
Following the physical journey of the internet, from fiber optic cables through sewers and under oceans, from London to NYC and finally to Silicon Valley, the film reveals that what is often thought of as an 'open, democratic and free' world is in fact dominated by a small group of powerful players. Meanwhile our kids - merely pawns in the game - are adapting to this new world - along with their expectation of friendship, their cognition and their sexuality.
DVD / 2013 / 90 minutes
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By Barbara Miller
Their voices are suppressed, prohibited and censored. But world-famous bloggers Yoani Sanchez, Zeng Jinyan and Farnaz Seifi are unafraid of their dictatorial regimes. These fearless women represent a new, networked generation of modern rebels. In Cuba, China and Iran their blogs shake the foundations of the state information monopoly, putting them at great risk.
This film accompanies these brave young cyberfeminists on perilous journeys. Eyewitness reports and clandestine footage show Sánchez's brutal beating by Cuban police for criticizing her country's regime; Chinese human rights activist Jinyan under house arrest for four years; and Iranian journalist and women's advocate Seifi forced into exile, where she blogs under a pseudonym. Tracing each woman's use of social media to denounce and combat violations of human rights and free speech in her home country, FORBIDDEN VOICES attests to the Internet's potential for building international awareness and political pressure.
DVD (Color) / 2012 / 96 minutes
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Director: Mathieu Roy & Harold Crooks
Technological advancement, economic development, population increase - are they signs of a thriving society? Or too much of a good thing? Based on the best-selling book A Short History of Progress, this provocative documentary explores the concept of progress in our modern world, guiding us through a sweeping but detailed survey of the major "progress traps" facing our civilization in the arenas of technology, economics, consumption, and the environment.
Featuring powerful arguments from such visionaries as Jane Goodall, Margaret Atwood, Stephen Hawking, Craig Venter, Robert Wright, Michael Hudson, and Ronald Wright, this enlightening and visually spectacular film invites us to contemplate the progress traps that destroyed past civilizations and that lie treacherously embedded in our own. Leading critics of Wall Street, cognitive psychologists, and ecologists lay bare the consequences of progress-as-usual as the film travels around the world - from a burgeoning China to the disappearing rainforests of Brazil to a chimp research lab in New Iberia, Louisiana - to construct a shocking overview of the way our global economic system is eating away at our planet's resources and shackling entire populations with poverty.
Providing an honest look at the risks and pitfalls of running 21st Century "software" (our accumulated knowledge) on 50,000-year-old "hardware" (our primate brains), Surviving Progress offers a challenge: to prove making apes smarter was not an evolutionary dead end.
DVD / 2012 / 86 minutes
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