This week marks the beginning of the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City — so on this week’s Science Friday, we’re taking the opportunity to talk to people behind two science-related motion pictures.
In our first hour, Ira will talk with Diane Bell, the writer and director of the film ‘Obselidia,’ a love story involving a man who is trying to compile an encyclopedia of obsolete things. When the characters are confronted with the possibility of a planetwide catastrophe due to climate change, they must come to terms with ideas of progress, obsolescence, and extinction. The film won the Alfred P. Sloan Award at this year’s Sundance film festival. (Full disclosure: Science Friday, and this site, receive Sloan Foundation funding.) Here’s the trailer:
In our second hour, Ira talks with Michael Madsen, director of the film “Into Eternity.” His film looks at ‘Onkalo,’ a Finnish nuclear waste repository now under development, and the attempts to design methods to warn future generations away from the site. Since no person involved with the Onkalo site today will be alive when it is completed, what’s the best way to warn future civilizations that the buried remains of our nuclear era must never, ever be unearthed? Here’s the trailer.
