Presented in English, with some Portugues and German with English subtitles

Recommended for ages 10+

Every year, over 1,700 students from 75 countries compete in the annual International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), a highly competitive showcase of the world’s top young scientific minds. Selected from millions of students who qualified through sanctioned events to reach the international competition, these finalists are competing for the coveted top prize that, as one previous winner explains, “will change your life in ways you won’t even comprehend.”

Science Fair follows one mentor and nine students from around the world as they prepare their projects and team for the 2017 ISEF event in Los Angeles. Though all are participating for the love of science, we also learn that there are other underlying influences motivating them to pursue their dreams of participating in the competition. Featuring interviews with the charming young scientists, their parents and mentors, as well as past ISEF winners, this absorbing film illuminates a group of amazing young men and women who are on a path to change the world through science.

www.utahfilmcenter.org

National Geographic Live - Ocean Soul with Brian Skerry Take a deep dive with this photographer as he guides us on a tour under the sea—beneath Arctic ice or in predator-infested waters. His photographs garnered Skerry the title of National Geographic Explorer of the Year. He is also a 2014 National Geographic Photography Fellow, and winner of 11 awards in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Competition. He’ll describe the stories behind images so intimate, you could mistake them for studio portraits, rather than capturing undersea life, itself.

This is Home was supported through our Fiscal Sponsorship program.

This is Home is an intimate portrait of four Syrian refugee families arriving in America and struggling to find their footing. Displaced from their homes and separated from loved ones, they are given eight months of assistance from the International Rescue Committee to become self-sufficient. As they learn to adapt to challenges, including the newly imposed travel ban, their strength and resilience are tested. It is a universal story, highlighted by humor and heartbreak, about what it’s like to start over, no matter the obstacles.

After surviving the traumas of war, the families arrive in Baltimore, Maryland and are met with a new set of trials. They attend cultural orientation classes and job training sessions where they must “learn America” – everything from how to take public transportation to negotiating new gender roles – all in an ever-changing and increasingly hostile political environment. Their goals are completely relatable: find a job, pay the bills, and make a better life for the next generation.

We witness the families’ struggles and triumphs up close through the drama of everyday life. Through intimate access, this cinema vérité film takes a fresh look at the classic American immigration story and challenges us to see past differences to find common ground. This is Home goes beyond the statistics, headlines, and political rhetoric to tell deeply personal stories, putting a human face on the global refugee crisis.

www.utahfilmcenter.org

A small-town police officer struggles with the death of his mother, an impending divorce and custody battle, and his own clueless antics, in this award-winning offbeat character-driven film that blends cringeworthy humor with deep emotion.

www.utahfilmcenter.org

For a humorous introduction to the serious issue of Palestine and Israel, Utahns for a Just Peace in the Holy Land presents the award-winning film “The Wanted 18”. Through a clever mix of stop motion animation and interviews, "The Wanted 18" recreates an astonishing true story: the Israeli army's pursuit of 18 cows, whose independent milk production on a Palestinian collective farm was declared "a threat to the national security of the state of Israel." In the 1980s, as part of a Palestinian boycott of Israeli taxation and commodities, residents of Beit Sahour decided to form a collective and stop purchasing milk from Israeli companies, in a quest for greater self-sufficiency. They purchased cows from a sympathetic kibbutznik and set about teaching themselves how to care for the animals and milk them—even sending a member to the United States to learn dairy farming. The farm was a success, with strong local demand for “Intifada milk.” However, the herd was declared a “threat to the national security of the state of Israel” and Israel sought to impound the cows, forcing Palestinians to devise ways to keep them hidden. This is the first of a series of monthly films on Palestine and Israel that will be presented with a brief discussion following the movie at Tenth East Senior Center. Free and open to the public. We look forward to seeing you there. https://www.facebook.com/events/497386994086477/

 
A film that examines the remarkable role NASA plays both in our country and for our planet. Covering the past sixty years and into the coming decades, the film celebrates past accomplishments, investigates current initiatives, and surveys future plans. This film follows NASA to the moon, to the surface of Mars, and to the outer reaches of our solar system, and brings those explorations home to their varied impacts on Earth.

In 1961, in announcing the moon shot, President Kennedy issued a great challenge: “We have given this program a high national priority,” he said. “Even though I realize that this is in some measure an act of faith and vision, for we do not now know what benefits await us.” ABOVE AND BEYOND asks the question: what has become of President Kennedy’s faith in human ingenuity, his grand vision and aspiration?

Now, some six decades after Kennedy’s speech, when the merits and values of NASA are being hotly debated, ABOVE AND BEYOND takes measure. We stand in awe and admiration, bearing witness not only to all that NASA has given humankind, but also to the vital and ongoing role NASA plays in ensuring humankind’s future.

We follow as NASA searches for other life in our solar system and discovers habitable worlds orbiting neighboring stars. As it peers into the night sky with the Hubble Space Telescope discovering tens of thousands of hidden galaxies. All the while, for more than half a century, the space administration never takes its eyes off our home planet. It monitors the Earth’s seas and skies, its snows and sands, in an unrelenting effort to amass the greatest store of knowledge in the history of humankind.

It is through these dual roles, exploring both space and Earth, that NASA seeks to truly understand our place in the Universe. So that we might see our planet for what it is: The only place in the universe known to harbor life, a little blue marble alone in a vast, silent void, as wonderful as it is fragile.

www.utahfilmcenter.org

National Geographic Live - On the Trail of Big Cats, with Steve Winter From Asian jungles where resilient tiger populations persist, to the Himalaya, home of the rare snow leopard. Onward to the rainforests of Latin America to spy on the elusive jaguar—and to Hollywood, in pursuit of the American cougar. (No, not that cougar.). The legendary National Geographic photographer, known for his award-winning feature stores in National Geographic magazine, will lead you from the Eccles stage, around the world in search of big cats; and shed light on our role in their conservation.

Bisbee ’17 is a nonfiction feature film by award-winning filmmaker Robert Greene set in Bisbee, Arizona, an eccentric old mining town just miles away from both Tombstone and the Mexican border.

Radically combining collaborative documentary, western and musical elements, the film follows several members of the close-knit community as they attempt to reckon with their town’s darkest hour. In 1917, nearly two-thousand immigrant miners, on strike for better wages and safer working conditions, were violently rounded up by their armed neighbors, herded onto cattle cars, shipped to the middle of the New Mexican desert and left there to die. This long-buried and largely forgotten event came to be known as the Bisbee Deportation.

The film documents locals as they play characters and stage dramatic scenes from the controversial story, culminating in a large-scale recreation of the deportation itself on the exact day of its 100th anniversary. These dramatized scenes are based on subjective versions of the story and offer conflicting views of the event, underscoring the difficulty of collective memory, while confronting the current political predicaments of immigration, unionization, environmental damage and corporate corruption with direct, haunting messages about solidarity and struggle.

www.utahfilmcenter.org

The Sundance Film Festival is returning to Utah January 24 - February 3, 2019 with screenings in Park City, Salt Lake, and the Sundance Resort. Check out the full program of world-premiere films, virtual reality, music, panel discussions, and more at sundance.org/festival.

https://utahpresents.org/events/banff-film-festival-2/