This grant provides continuing support to Carnegie Mellon University, one of the Foundation's six film school partners, for three more years of activities designed to encourage top film students to develop screenplays about science and technology. Activities supported under this grant include a symposium featuring internationally recognized scientists and technologists discussing current work in their fields; two semesters of training in screenwriting, guest-faculty workshops by accomplished screenwriting mentors; consultations by scientists and technologists on scripts in progress; the presentation of two awards for outstanding student screenplays exploring scientific themes or featuring scientists or technologists as characters, and activities to promote student career advancement, including industry showcases in Los Angeles and New York.

This grant funds three years of the Sloan Science-in-Film initiative by the Sundance Institute, which runs the Sundance Film Festival, the premiere independent film festival in the U.S. Funds will support four annual components of the initiative: a commissioning grant, a feature film fellowship, a $20,000 best Science and Technology feature film prize, and a panel of filmmakers and scientists followed by an awards reception.

This grant to the WGBH Educational Foundation provides development funds for a screenplay about physicist Lise Meitner, who, with Otto Hahn, did the critical research leading to the discovery of nuclear fission, but who was excluded from the Nobel Prize that went to Hahn. Funds will go towards hiring a professional screenwriter to work with the director on the project and for a financing package that will enable a theatrical release and television broadcast on PBS's NOVA.

This grant provides support to the Coolidge Corner Theater, regularly voted the best movie theater in Boston and boasting a national reputation, as it continues its pioneering Science on Screen series and expands the series to movie theaters across the country. The Science on Screen series is notable because-in addition to screening traditional Sloan-style science films like Primer, 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Brief History of Time-it takes non-scientific movies like American Beauty, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Fight Club and shines a serious scientific lens on major themes in these films, following each showing with in-depth discussions led by working scientists. At the Arthouse Convergence, a major meeting of Art House theater professionals held in advance of the Sundance Film Festival, Coolidge plans to make a formal presentation and hold a Science on Screen workshop, distributing the syllabus, showcasing videos of speakers, discussing programming ideas, and exploring potential marketing and audience development tactics. This effort is an experiment that seeks to build on build on Coolidge's existing successes and scale them up in a meaningful way.

This grant provides support to the The Hamptons International Film Festival (HIFF), for continued development of its activities in the Sloan Film program. HIFF activities consist of a $25,000 annual feature film prize with multiple screenings, a panel with filmmakers and scientists, a reception, and an intensive screenwriting workshop with staged readings of works-in-progress at the festival. Previous Foundation support of HIFF has resulted in an impressive roster of Sloan-winning films and directors, including Darren Aronofsky, Julian Schnabel, Michael Apted, Bill Condon and Marc Abraham, all of whom participated-in person, on video or via letter-at the festival's tenth anniversary tribute to the accomplishments of the Sloan partnership in 2009. Funds from this grant will ensure continuation of this successful partnership through the next three years.

This grant to the Tribeca Film Institute will fund a pilot program to establish an annual Grand Jury Prize award for the single best student screenplay among the Foundation's six film school partners and to develop that script towards production. The aim of the award is to stimulate greater interest and excitement among the participating film schools and film students by awarding a "best of the best" prize and by fast-tracking the winning project for development so it becomes a major career opportunity for the winner. If successful, the award promises to lift the visibility and prestige of both of the winning filmmaker, his school, and the Sloan Film program as a whole.

This grant supports the continued operation of the Sloan Science and Film website, scienceandfilm.org. Hosted and operated by the American Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI), America's leading film museum, the site showcases student films produced by the Foundation's film school partners and provides a synopsis of all film projects under development with the Foundation's six film school and four film festival partners, promoting the Sloan Film program while serving as a key resource for program participants. The MoMI website remains an essential component of the Sloan Film program and the nearest thing to one-stop shopping for those seeking to learn about the program in all its aspects. The site has approximately 50 award-winning Sloan films available in their entirety for live streaming, making it an up-to-date showcase and a constantly evolving cinematheque for science film shorts. In addition, the site has an interactive directory that lists and describes every winning student screenplay and film, and includes every film project under development with our four main partners: Sundance, Hamptons, Tribeca and Film Independent. The MoMI Sloan Science and Film website remains a unique, state-of-the art feature that very few non-profit programs, or even for-profit film companies, can boast.

This is a three-year renewal grant from the American Film Institute (AFI), one of the nation's leading film schools, to continue awarding tuition stipends, screenwriting and production awards for Science and Technology (S&T) films and to hold an annual S&T seminar. The film school program, supported for over a decade now, has been successful as measured by both quantity and quality of work. Beyond that, it is the cornerstone of our broader film program because it has created a growing body of work-and an emerging cadre of talented filmmakers-all focusing on S&T films. AFI has a unique status as a national film conservatory and their finished Sloan films, such as Skylab and The Monster and the Peanut, traditionally have the best production values and the most sophisticated "look" of all Sloan films. AFI has been very sensitive to the economic situation and this request is substantially lower than their previous request. The Foundation has supported this work at the American Film Institute since 1996 with total grants of $1,301,275.

The Tribeca Film Institute (TFI) requests two more years of support for the TFI Sloan Filmmaker Fund and Retrospective Screening and Discussion Series. Our early partnership with Jane Rosenthal and Robert De Niro at the Tribeca Film Festival-of which we were founding sponsors-has yielded several high profile projects that helped establish our film credibility. Tribeca has shrewdly begun pulling together the most promising Sloan projects from other programs, as well as developing its own, to give us the strongest suite of film projects we've ever had. One example is Face Value-the Hedy Lamar story which originated at Tribeca, then went to the Hamptons and came back for a second Tribeca grant last year. It was at our Tribeca selection committee meeting that committee member Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler) read Face Value and recommended his wife, Academy Award-winning actress Rachel Weisz, for the role of Hedy. By attracting people of Aronosky's caliber onto our committees-Marc Abraham (Children of Men, Flash of Genius), Sarah Green (Frieda, Girlfight), John Hart (Proof, Revolutionary Road), Caroline Baron (Capote)-Tribeca has catapulted Sloan into a front row industry seat. Face Value is slated to shoot in January 2010. $280,000 of this request would go directly to filmmakers, one reason for this program's effectiveness. Tribeca is an extremely strong performer, the lynch?pin of our screenplay development efforts, and is a well-regarded, high profile component of the Sloan Film Program. In addition to supporting the Tribeca Film Institute with its screenwriting development program, the Foundation has supported every Tribeca Film Festival since its inception in 2002, with total grants of $2,548,200.