Science On Screen: A Science Movie Mash Up – 2016

Tuesday, April 5th, 7:00 PM Free Admission

With Science on Screen, theaters pair a variety of films with science and technology experts. Each film serves as a jumping-off point for the expert speaker to explore a related scientific or technological topic in a way that engages general audiences – from time perception in Inception to the theoretical neurobiology of the zombies in The Night of the Living Dead. This program began in 2005 at Coolidge Corner Theatre in Boston, MA and has since expanded to other independent cinemas through a national grant initiative funded by the prestigious Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and administered by the Coolidge. The Athena Cinema was among only 23 cinemas to receive a Science on Screen grant in 2015.

In conjunction with the film there will be a talk with Ohio University Associate Professor of Environmental and Plant Biology, Arthur Trese.

Dir. Ciro Guerra
Columbia, Narrative
125 min.

At once blistering and poetic, the ravages of colonialism cast a dark shadow over the South American landscape in EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT, the third feature by Ciro Guerra. Filmed in stunning black-and-white, SERPENT centers on Karamakate, an Amazonian shaman and the last survivor of his people, and the two scientists who, over the course of 40 years, build a friendship with him. The film was inspired by the real-life journals of two explorers (Theodor Koch-Grünberg and Richard Evans Schultes) who traveled through the Colombian Amazon during the last century in search of the sacred and difficult-to-find psychedelic Yakruna plant.

“Guerra’s stark allegory of the extinction of indigenous cultures at the hands of well-meaning but ignorant white Europeans is powerfully resonant in this gorgeously shot film, touted as the first feature to be shot in the Colombian jungle in over three decades.”
Nicholas Bell, IONCINEMA