Sloan Summit 25: A Look Back at Some of Our Favorite Sloan Grantee Films
With the 2025 Sloan Film Summit just around the corner, we want to look back at some of our favorite films that have been supported in the past by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. These films are dramas, science fictions, biopics and big budget blockbusters. Yes, they all have science, math, technology, economics or engineering at their core, and this list goes to show just how much storytelling juice you can get out of those topics.
The films on this list show how universal stories about the sciences can be. We all care about nature, we all look up at the stars and wonder and we all love solving a good puzzle. And that’s what the sciences are all about. Both art and science help you understand the world better, just in different ways, and these films prove what you can do when they come together.
Adventures of a Mathematician (2020)
Writer/Director: Thor Klein
Featuring: Philippe Tlokinski, Esther Garrel, Sam Keeley
Cambridge, USA, 1942. Stan Ulam is a 30-year-old talented Polish Jewish mathematician, a good-looking bon vivant who is quick with a joke. Stan’s life becomes complicated when he loses his fellowship at Harvard but his best friend, the Hungarian genius Johnny von Neumann quickly offers him a mysterious job which takes him to New Mexico. Stan moves to Los Alamos with Françoise, a French woman he meets and marries after a whirlwind romance. Surrounded by young, eccentric, charismatic immigrant scientists Stan begins top secret work on a nuclear bomb that could potentially blow up the entire world. While desperately trying to help his sister flee Nazi occupied Poland, Stan teams up with Johnny to create the first computer giving birth to the digital age as Europe bursts into flames.
2017, Tribeca Film Institute: Sloan Filmmaker Fund: Screenplay Development Award
2017, Film Independent: Sloan Producer’s Grant
2019, Tribeca Film Institute: Sloan Discretionary Fund
2020, Film Independent: Sloan Distribution Grant
After Yang (2021)
Director: Kogonada
Writer: Alexander Weinstein, Kogonada
Featuring: Colin Farrell, Jodie Turner-Smith, Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja
When his young daughter’s beloved companion, an android named Yang, malfunctions, Jake (Colin Farrell) searches for a way to repair him. In the process, Jake discovers the life that has been passing in front of him, reconnecting with his wife (Jodie Turner-Smith) and daughter across a distance he didn’t know was there.
2022, Sundance Institute: Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize
2022, Film Independent: Sloan Distribution Grant
Hidden Figures (2016)
Director: Theodore Melfi
Writer: Allison Schroeder, Theodore Melfi, Margot Lee Shetterfly
Featuring: Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monae
As the United States raced against Russia to put a man in space, NASA found untapped talent in a group of female African American mathematicians who served as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in U.S. history. Based on the unbelievable true life stories of three of these women known as “human computers,” follow these women as they quickly rose through the ranks of NASA alongside many of history’s greatest minds, specifically tasked with calculating the momentous launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit and guaranteeing his safe return. Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson and Katherine Goble Johnson crossed all gender race, and professional lines while their brilliance and desire to dream big, beyond anything ever accomplished before by the human race, firmly cemented them in U.S. history as true American heroes.
2016, SFFILM: Sloan Science in Cinema Prize
Radical (2023)
Director: Christopher Zalla
Writer: Christopher Zalla, Joshaua Davis
Featuring: Eugenio Derbez, Daniel Haddad, Jennifer Trejo
Who will the sixth-grade students at Jose Urbina Lopez Elementary in Matamoros become? They are among the worst performing students in Mexico, the world they know is one of violence and hardship, and their classrooms are dominated by an atmosphere of overbearing discipline, not possibility. It might seem like a dead end… but it is also the perfect place for new teacher Sergio Juarez to try something different. There’s just one problem: Sergio (played by an amazing Eugenio Derbez) has no idea what he’s doing.
2023, Film Independent: Sloan Distribution Grant
The Theory of Everything (2014)
Director: James Marsh
Writer: Anthony McCarten, Jane Hawking
Featuring: Eddie Redmayne, Felicity Jones, Tom Prior
The Theory of Everything is the story of the most brilliant and celebrated physicist of our time, Stephen Hawking, and Jane Wilde, the arts student he fell in love with while studying at Cambridge in the 1960s. Little was expected from Hawking, a bright but shiftless student of cosmology, after he was given just two years to live following the diagnosis of a fatal illness (ALS) at 21 years of age. He became galvanized, however, by the love of Jane Wilde, and went on to be called the “successor to Einstein,” as well as a husband and father to their three children. Over the course of their marriage, however, as Stephen’s body collapsed and his academic renown soared, fault lines were exposed that tested the resolve of their relationship and dramatically altered the course of both of their lives.
2025, NYU Tisch School of the Arts: Sloan Screenwriting Grant
Tesla (2020)
Writer/Director: Michael Almereyda
Featuring: Ethan Hawke, Eve Hewson, Eli A. Smith
A freewheeling take on visionary inventor Nikola Tesla, his interactions with Thomas Edison and J.P. Morgan’s daughter Anne and his breakthroughs in transmitting electrical power and light.
2020, Sundance Institute: Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize
2016, SFFILM: Sloan Science in Cinema Filmmaker Fellowship
Twisters (2024)
Director: Lee Isaac Chung
Writer: Mark L Smith, Joseph Kosinski, Michael Crichton
Featuring: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, Anthony Ramos
As storm season intensifies, the paths of former storm chaser Kate Carter, lured back to the open plains after a devastating encounter years prior, and reckless social-media superstar Tyler Owens collide when terrifying phenomena never seen before are unleashed. The pair and their competing teams find themselves squarely in the paths of multiple storm systems converging over central Oklahoma in the fight of their lives.
2024, SFFILM: Sloan Science in Cinema Prize
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