Sundance Institute and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s joint Science-In-Film Initiative awarded Love Me, from filmmaker duo Sam and Andy Zuchero, with this year’s juried Feature Film Prize at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.
Love Me has been awarded the 2024 Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize and received a $25,000 cash award from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation at today’s reception. The Prize is selected by a jury of film and science professionals and presented to an outstanding feature film focusing on science or technology as a theme, or depicting a scientist, engineer, or mathematician as a major character. The 2024 jury for the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize included Dr. Mandë Holford, Dr. Nia Imara, Matt Johnson, Theresa Park, and Courtney Stephens.
The jury shared that the Zucheros’ Love Me was selected “for its ambitious and formally inventive portrayal of a post-human Earth in which two machine-learning ‘life forms’ search for the cure to loneliness in the digital rubble of civilization, and for its original direction and engaging performances.”
Love Me / U.S.A. (Directors and Screenwriters: Sam Zuchero, Andy Zuchero, Producers: Kevin Rowe, Luca Borghese, Ben Howe, Shivani Rawat, Julie Goldstein) — Long after humanity’s extinction, a buoy and a satellite meet online and fall in love. Cast: Kristen Stewart, Steven Yeun. Sam and Andy Zuchero are a filmmaking team from Topanga, California. They have been making art together since their teens, and Love Me is their feature debut.
“We are delighted to honor Sam and Andy Zuchero’s Love Me, an original and wildly imaginative film about the nature of human identity and our connection to each other in a post-human world mediated through artificial intelligence,” said Doron Weber, Vice President and Program Director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “In a year when Chris Nolan’s great-man-of-science biopic, Oppenheimer, based on the Sloan book American Prometheus, broke box office records and garnered acclaim, we are especially pleased to award three screenwriting fellowships to four outstanding writers who dramatize the unique obstacles and underappreciated contributions of exceptional women in science and technology. This year’s winners are wonderful additions to the nationwide Sloan film program and further proof of the vitality of our pioneering, two-decade partnership with Sundance.”
Also announced today at the festival were the recipients of three artist grants aimed at supporting projects currently in development: Emily Everhard received the Sloan Episodic Fellowship for Tektite, Sara Crow and Daniel Rafailedes received the Sloan Development Fellowship for Satoshi, and Lizzi Oyebode received the Sloan Commissioning Grant for Inverses. The filmmakers received a total of $84,000 in cash awards and were celebrated today at a reception hosted by the Foundation in Park City. Prior to the reception, the Feature Film Prize winners participated in a Sloan Foundation–sponsored Beyond Film event, The Big Conversation: Screen of Consciousness, where they discussed cinema’s portrayal of artificial intelligence.
Emily Everhard (writer) will receive a $17,000 cash award from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for Tektite through the Sundance Institute / Sloan Episodic Fellowship. Previous recipients of the Sundance Institute / Sloan Episodic Fellowship include: The Professor and the Spy, Our Dark Lady, The Harvard Computers, and Higher.
Emily Everhard is an actress, writer, and director. After studying History at Dartmouth College, Everhard worked on documentaries for Netflix, AMC/Sundance TV, and PBS. Emily’s narrative projects are inspired by true stories told through a queer, female perspective. She is completing her MFA in Screenwriting at Columbia University.
Tektite / U.S.A. In 1970, five elite female scientists arrive in the U.S. Virgin Islands to join NASA’s aquatic mission, “Tektite.” While NASA secretly psychologically surveils the aquanauts, the women must unite to survive life-threatening obstacles in the depths of the ocean.
Sara Crow and Daniel Rafailedes (co-writers and co-directors) will receive a $17,000 cash award from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for Satoshi through the Sundance Institute / Sloan Development Fellowship. Previous recipients of the Sundance Institute / Sloan Development Fellowship include: Light Mass Energy, Moving Bangladesh, Chariot, and Tidal Disruption.
Sara Crow is a Brooklyn-based writer-director and an MFA candidate at NYU’s Graduate Film Program, where she is a Martin Scorsese Scholar. David Rafailedes is a New York City–based writer-director from Canton, Ohio. He is currently in NYU’s Graduate Film Program pursuing an MFA/MBA. Rafailedes is the co-playwright of Cellino v. Barnes.
Satoshi / U.S.A. The potentially true story of a teenage anime-obsessed hacktivist who, after losing her scholarship to Stanford, returns home to Arizona to become the mysterious inventor of a new digital currency called Bitcoin.
Lizzi Oyebode (writer-director) will receive a $25,000 cash award from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for Inverses through the Sundance Institute / Sloan Commissioning Grant. Previous winners of the Sundance Institute / Sloan Commissioning Grant include: Incompleteness, The Futurist, Pharmacopeia, The Plutonians, and Challenger.
Lizzi Oyebode is a filmmaker and writer from Washington, D.C. Her debut film project, Tween the Ropes, was awarded an Academy Nicholl Fellowship. Her historical work has been honored by the Writers Guild of America West, Fox, SFFILM Rainin, and The Black List. Her prior career was in STEM.
Inverses / U.S.A. The story of the Nazi takeover of the world’s leading university math department and the lone Jewish woman professor central to the resistance: Emmy Noether.
Previous recipients of the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize include Sophie Barthes’ The Pod Generation (2023), Kogonada’s After Yang (2022), Alexis Gambis’ Son of Monarchs (2021), Michael Almereyda’s Tesla (2020), Chiwetel Ejiofor’s The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (2019), Aneesh Chaganty and Sev Ohanian’s Searching (2018), Michael Almereyda’s Marjorie Prime (2017), Ciro Guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent (2016), Kyle Patrick Alvarez and Tim Talbott’s The Stanford Prison Experiment (2015), Mike Cahill’s I Origins (2014), Andrew Bujalski’s Computer Chess (2013), Jake Schreier and Christopher D. Ford’s Robot & Frank (2012), Musa Syeed’s Valley of Saints (2012), Mike Cahill’s Another Earth (2011), Diane Bell’s Obselidia (2010), Max Mayer’s Adam (2009), Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer (2008), Chen Shi-Zheng’s Dark Matter (2007); Andrucha Waddington’s The House of Sand (2006), Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005), Shane Carruth’s Primer (2004), and Mark Decena’s Dopamine (2003).