Breakthroughs: The Sloan Science on Screen Programme
Returning for a second year, the Sloan Science on Screen Programme puts science in the spotlight at TIFF and equips screen creators with industry connections and creative support to strengthen and highlight their feature-length projects about science and technology.
Funding for this programme is provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Public Understanding of Science and Technology program, which supports books, radio, film, television, theatre, and new media to reach a wide, non-specialized audience and to bridge the two cultures of science and the humanities.
Supported by
- campaignProject Pitch
- groupsWriter Fellowship
- videocamFilm Showcase
Sloan Science and Technology Project Pitch
The Sloan Science and Technology Project Pitch gives four Canadian and international creators the opportunity to pitch their feature film or episodic project — featuring science and/or technology themes and/or characters — at the 50th Toronto International Film Festival.
Each participant will deliver a maximum 15-minute presentation in front of a live audience and panel of producers, sales agents, and decision-makers.
2025 Sloan Science and Technology Project Pitch Participants
Daniel Wilner is a writer and director working across film, theatre, and fiction. A Rhodes Scholar with degrees from Harvard and Oxford, he has feature films in development with Mark Gordon Pictures and PageBoy Productions, as well as a stage play in development with Mark Gordon. He recently completed the manuscript for his first novel. His fiction and documentary shorts, supported by the National Film Board of Canada and BravoFACT, have screened at festivals worldwide and been distributed by Netflix, Aeon, and BravoTV.
When a pioneering love scientist recruits four very different volunteers — a former nun, a restless husband in an open marriage, a heartbroken fiancé, and a guarded trans woman — to map the brain’s lust, love, and attachment centres, she discovers that proving love’s biology may force her to confront the riskiest experiment of all: her own heart. Based on the groundbreaking life and work of Dr. Helen Fisher.
Lizzi Oyebode is a filmmaker and writer. Her feature Inverses received the 2024 Sundance Institute and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Commissioning Grant. She also was awarded an Academy Nicholl Fellowship. Oyebode’s other film projects have been honoured by organizations including the Writers Guild of America West, SFFILM, the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, and The Black List.
Mathematician Emmy Noether faces her toughest test when the Nazis seize power in Germany. Inspired by true events.
Tanju Özdemir is a Turkish filmmaker from the Black Sea region whose narrative films explore the complexities of immigration, identity, and memory across borders and generations. His work has been featured at prominent national and international film festivals. He received his MFA in film and media arts from Emerson College and currently teaches film production as an assistant professor at Emory University. Prior to filmmaking, he studied physics at Boğaziçi University, where his interest in cosmology and data science began. Özdemir recently completed production on his short film Woodpecker, which follows a Kurdish gay graduate student from Turkey seeking asylum in the US while navigating the complexities of the Turkish-Kurdish diaspora. He is currently developing his debut feature film, The Rings of Saturn.
A pregnant Greek-American astrophysicist, working on the first image of a black hole (M87), travels to northeastern Turkey to trace her late mother’s origins, only to be drawn into the unravelling memory of an aging woman with Alzheimer’s and a village still haunted by the Greek-Turkish population exchange, forcing her to reconcile cosmic discovery with personal and historical loss.
Nile Price is a director from Richmond, VA, whose work explores memory, resilience, and cultural legacy through poetic visual storytelling. A Cy Twombly Fellow at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and a 2023–24 Gotham Fellow, Price brings both artistic depth and cinematic discipline to every project. His short For the Moon, inspired by astronaut Ronald McNair, won First Prize at NASA’s CineSpace and screened at the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival. A sickle cell survivor and NYU Tisch MFA graduate, Price now shapes the next generation of filmmakers as a directing instructor at VCUArts Cinema.
McNair tells the largely unheralded true story of the African American astronaut Dr. Ronald McNair and his journey as a member of NASA’s most diverse class during the historic Space Shuttle Program.
Questions? Contact us by email at industry@tiff.net.
Sloan Science on Film Showcase: Silent Friend
Join us for a special screening of Ildikó Enyedi’s Silent Friend. Set in a botanical garden within a medieval German university town, the film centres on a majestic Ginkgo biloba tree — which can famously live up to 1,000 years — that silently observes humans over the centuries. The film will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker and a professor of molecular and plant biology, Shelley Lumba.
This vibrant discussion on trees, botany, and molecular communication will be moderated by TIFF programmer Dorota Lech, exploring how plants communicate with other organisms and what they might be attempting to convey through molecular mechanisms.
The Sloan Science on Film Showcase spotlights two feature films with science and technology themes per year: one Official Selection title at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, and one year-round programming title at TIFF Lightbox.
Past selections include Lee Isaac Chung’s Twisters, Nacho Vigalondo’s Daniela Forever, Molly McGlynn’s Fitting In, and Matt Johnson’s BlackBerry. With the support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, science-driven storytelling is brought to the forefront, making it accessible, inclusive, and deeply engaging for audiences.
Guests
Ildikó Enyedi was born in Budapest, where she studied economics and filmmaking. Her feature films include the Festival Official Selections My Twentieth Century (89), Magic Hunter (94), Simon, the Magician (99), On Body and Soul (17), and The Story of My Wife (21). Silent Friend (25) is her latest film.
Professor Shelley Lumba is an internationally renowned plant molecular biologist whose research explores how plants sense and adapt to their environment, with a focus on co-operation and conflict between plants and other organisms. At the University of Toronto, she investigates molecular signals such as light and hormones that regulate growth, germination, and resilience in changing ecosystems. She has published in Science, Molecular Cell, and Nature Plants and has been cited over 5000 times. Lumba also mentors the next generation of scientists, bridging science and society by highlighting the profound connections between plant life and human experience.
Professor Shelley Lumba is an internationally renowned plant molecular biologist whose research explores how plants sense and adapt to their environment, with a focus on co-operation and conflict between plants and other organisms. At the University of Toronto, she investigates molecular signals such as light and hormones that regulate growth, germination, and resilience in changing ecosystems. She has published in Science, Molecular Cell, and Nature Plants and has been cited over 5000 times. Lumba also mentors the next generation of scientists, bridging science and society by highlighting the profound connections between plant life and human experience.
Sloan Science and Technology Writer Fellowship
The Sloan Science and Technology Writer Fellowship offers a project development grant and creative support for one emerging to mid-level feature film or episodic screenwriter whose project has science and technology themes and/or characters.
The Fellowship will connect the participant with industry and scientific experts, insights, and resources to support the script, production, and theatrical release of their project. Join us in congratulating this year’s selected screenwriter.
2025 TIFF–Sloan Science & Technology Writer Fellowship Recipient
Hailing from Columbus, Georgia, Ivan Rome is a filmmaker whose Southern roots run through everything he creates.
Recently securing his MFA from Columbia University, he is the recipient of Columbia’s inaugural Bobby Kashif Cox Memorial Scholarship, an inaugural Diverso’s Black Writers in Focus Fellow, a Columbia Alumni Association Scholar, and an MTV Joel Schumacher & Sophia Cranshaw Scholar for the 2023 Gotham EDU Film & Media Career Development Program.
He has also worked as an MTV Entertainment Ambassador, a Narrative Programming Fellow for The Gotham Film & Media Institute, and a Narrative Intern at Ryan Coogler’s Proximity Media. Additionally, Rome was selected for the SEEN Black Filmmakers Program sponsored by The Blackhouse Foundation, participated in New York Stage and Film’s 2024 Filmmakers’ Workshop, and is currently developing a new pilot as a part of Mike Gauyo’s Black Boy Writes Mentorship Initiative.
Rome’s work has screened at several Academy Award–qualifying festivals and on American Airlines flights, and explores the complexities of our culture through humour and heart.
After the incorporation of a new technology puts her job and safety at risk, a frustrated employee recruits a computer scientist, an aging janitor, her little brother, and her worst enemy to complete the seemingly impossible mission of breaking into a maximum-security laboratory.
Questions? Contact us by email at industry@tiff.net.
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