Today, Thursday 10th November, Trieste Science+Fiction will kick off at 6.00pm. The games will begin at Cinecity in Room 2 with Abdus Salam. The Scream of Symmetry, a documentary about the life of the celebrated scientist was produced by Pilgrim Film in collaboration with ICTP.
The film narrates the compelling story of the life of Salam, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1979 and founder of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste. To date, some 100,000 people, mainly researchers from developing countries, have been able to benefit from this. Through the testimonies of front runners in international science, the film retraces the most important moments in the history of physics: the dream of a theory united by elementary particles and the fundamental forces of nature.
This year’s edition will be an intense one, full of prestigious guests and highly anticipated previews, starting with the opening films. There will be the film Monsters, by Gareth Edwards which will open the official Neon section at 8.00pm. It is a kind of low budget film that has already become a cinematic example, which mixes a road movie with a sci-fi romance.
The idea of Monsters came from a picture taken by the director on holiday: a group of fishermen struggling with a massive octopus caught in a net and another group laughing at them. The film began to take shape in his head, a giant beast that thrashes its tentacles about, destroying everything in its path and wiping out all human presence, making a habitat for itself such as there would have been before man. Having grown up with films such as Jurassic Park, E.T and other Spielberg classics, Gareth Edwards wanted to make a film with monsters as the main characters, but in the most realistic way possible. It needed a mixture of a love story, realism and science-fiction. In the words of the director, “I began to do some research in search of inspiration and I discovered that, according to scientists, there is a high probability that life could be found on one of Jupiter’s moons, Europa. NASA sent a probe to look for evidence: it was the inspiration I wanted. I imagined one of these probes returning to Earth, full of micro-organisms. And obviously our environment’s reaction and the new life forms that could reproduce undisturbed for years. The the idea of the photograph came to me, the journey that should have been the rescue of the boss’ daughter and the return to the protected area, which turns into a road movie in the infected area. Set in Guatemala, Belize and Mexico, Monsters was filmed with a crew of just four people and only two main actors: Scoot McNairy and Whitney Able.
At 10.15pm it will be the turn of the documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams by Werner Herzog. The film was shot entirely in 3D and is based on the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc cave in France.
