2025 Festival Film Screenings and Awards Announced!

October 17, 2025 —

Science meets the big screen in New York City for the 11th Raw Science Film Festival with Dr. Larry Corey of Operation Warp Speed

Showcasing select films over days of panels and public engagements, the festival hosts filmmakers and scientists from around the world. The three day event includes screenings and workshops at various locations in New York City from October 24 - 26, 2025. The awards ceremony is at the glamorous Florence Gould Theater on the evening of Saturday, Oct. 25. Wear your geek chic!

With a mission to humanize science, and elevate its experts to the forefront of popular culture, the Raw Science Film Festival inspires audiences to explore science and technology themes from a fresh vantage. Prior films have featured a wide range of topics, from artificial intelligence and cancer treatment to the shifting nature of our warming planet and the inner workings of the human mind.

The expert festival Jury is headed by film director Sean McNamara, Jury President (Film), and Newton Campbell Jr., Jury President (Science). Film historian Betsy McLane is Director of Programming.

“This is a unique festival, not only because everything relates to the sciences, but because it includes live performance, practical workshops, and special opportunities for filmmakers, scientists, and educators to interact. It's a chance to get science right in films,” per Betsy McLane.

From its inception, the festival has been a partner to the performing arts and the filmmaking community, a relationship that expanded this year.

New for 2025, Raw Science is collaborating with:

Backstage, a leading casting vehicle for film talent and one of the world’s leading platforms to connect actors with studios, with nearly 250,000 members

Entertainment Identifier Registry (EIDR), a global public registry of audiovisual content, which will be providing every festival submission with an EIDR tag, providing a unique digital fingerprint for each film, a critical need in an age of AI-rendered content

The performing arts are critical in communicating the stories of science. The Backstage partnership includes a Raw Science Backstage Best Actor Award as well as services for filmmakers. The combined effort of the festival and EIDR not only tags important works of scientific, historical, and cultural significance, but it also helps independent filmmakers in their journey through the full lifecycle of distribution.

The film Ending HIV: The Journey to a Vaccine won the Jury Award for Best Professional Documentary Feature, an incredibly timely film that excellently captures one of the scientific stories of our time over decades.

Since the early 1980s, scientists, researchers, community organizers, faith leaders, and countless organizations have poured their lives into understanding and battling HIV — the most complicated virus medicine has ever faced. When the HIV Vaccine Trials Network (HVTN) was formed in the 1990s, an unprecedented global collaboration took shape. But until now, the tireless work across countries, races, genders, and disciplines had never been fully narrated on screen.

Following the screening, audiences will hear directly from leading voices in HIV vaccine research and advocacy, including:

Larry Corey, MD, Principal Investigator of HVTN, faculty of the University of Washington and Fred Hutch Cancer Center, former director and president of Fred Hutch
Mitchell Warren, Executive Director, AVAC
Mark Harrington, Executive Director, Treatment Action Group
Filmmakers Matias Trachter & Norbi Zylberberg
Executive Producers Guido Rutenberg, Sally Bock, Andrea Benita, Claudia Graterol

The Grand Jury Prize was won for the first time in the festival’s history by a student filmmaker named Meike Schaapveld out of the Netherlands for her graduation film Ape to Ape. It is presented as a letter to the world-famous primatologist Frans de Waal, who passed away in 2024. The film reveals the age-old and vital social bond between humans and great apes. Meike will join the festival in New York to accept the award.

The Best Public Art Award goes to Einstein! The Play, a solo play written and performed by Jack Fry and directed by Tom Blomquist. It is the longest running show in Los Angeles and portrays Einstein’s years in war torn Berlin as he struggles to prove his theory of General Relativity and prove his relativity as a father. Jack Fry will perform excerpts from this critically acclaimed show at the awards ceremony.

Another world premieres include The National Science Foundation-funded feature documentary A Map of the World in Time. Over the course of 34 days at sea deep in the arctic circle, aboard the Research Vessel Neil Armstrong, the wages of knowledge are explored. The ship's mariners and scientists reflect on their life at sea, as they attempt to gain a greater understanding of climate change both past and present.The project was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, with additional support from the 2023 European Geosciences Union Journalism Fellowship, the latter awarding Georg Koszulinski a Science Journalism Fellowship.

The film The Eagle Obsession directed by Jeffrey Morris won the Raw Breakthrough Award for its ability to breakthrough and reach a large demographic of people to inspire interest and curiosity about a scientific topic. THE EAGLE OBSESSION is a cinematic odyssey by filmmaker Jeffrey Morris, exploring how the Apollo program and visionary science fiction of the 1960s and ’70s inspired a generation of thinkers, dreamers, and creators. At the center of the film is the Eagle Transporter—the fictional spacecraft from SPACE: 1999 that served as a symbol of bold, reasoned, humanistic futures.

The full list of festival films and select screening times are available on the festival website and event app.

JURY AWARDS

GRAND JURY PRIZE: Ape to Ape
Professional Documentary (> 40 min) : Ending HIV: The Journey to a Vaccine
Professional Documentary( < 40 min): Spacetime
Professional Dramatic (> 40 min): Rule Breakers
Professional Dramatic (< 40 min): Code Red
Professional Animation (< 40 min): Gentle as Moss on Stone
Student Documentary (> 40 min): Fission
Student Documentary (< 40 min): Ape to Ape
Student Dramatic (< 40 min): Demon Core

INDUSTRY AWARDS

Backstage Best Actor Award (Professional Film): Devin Sidell, "Love, Danielle"
Backstage Best Actor Award (Student Film): Connor Paolo, "Demon Core"
Raw Breakthrough Award: The Eagle Obsession
Raw Resonance Award (for stories that reverberate across nations): A Water Dream for 2100
Raw Radiance Award (for stories that convey the light of discovery through a scientist’s life): Cracking the Code: Phil Sharp and the Biotech Revolution
Best Visual Effects: DNA Break Repair by Homologous Recombination
Best Technical Innovation in Media: Imperia
Best Educational Media: Dark Matter Hunters: A Quantum View of the Invisible Universe
Best Public Art: Einstein! The Play
Amateur Dramatic (< 40 min): Misconception
Amateur Documentary (> 40 min): Space Chasers
Best Series (Documentary): Honorable Mention, War Child Chose Science

OFFICIAL SELECTIONS

Professional Documentary (> 40 min): A Map of the World in Time
Professional Documentary (> 40 min): Cosmic Coda
Professional Documentary (< 40 min): The Art of Looking
Professional Documentary (< 40 min): Graphene (Hugo Sindelar)
Professional Documentary (< 40 min): Spectral (Jason-Marc Mohamed)
Professional Dramatic Short (< 40 min): Retake

“The festival is described as being like the Oscars meets TED for its combination of live performances, scientific talks, and world class film honorees. Storytelling through film is a powerful way for fact-based experts to engage people,” says festival founder Keri Kukral. According to Noble Prize laureate physicist Kip Thorne for his fundamental contributions to the first detection of gravitational waves through the LIGO project, “It’s great fun!”

Launched in 2014 with support from the Science and Entertainment Exchange of the National Academy of Sciences, the juried Raw Science Film Festival has featured hundreds of films and filmmakers, with several leveraging their selection to later earn recognition at the Academy Awards.

For more on the Raw Science Film Festival, visit https://www.rawsciencefilmfestival.com.

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Raw Science Film Festival is a fiscally sponsored member of New York Live Arts, a non-profit tax-exempt organization. Contributions in support of Raw Science Film Festival’s work are greatly appreciated and may be made payable to New York Live Arts, Inc., earmarked for “the New York Live Arts member project of Raw Science Film Festival.” A description of the work and current project activities for which such contributions will be used are available from Raw Science Film Festival or New York Live Arts, upon request. All contributions are fully deductible to the extent allowed by law. (Note: A copy of New York Live Arts’ latest annual financial report filed with the New York State Department of State may be obtained by writing to the N.Y.S. Dept. of State, Charities Registration, 162 Washington Avenue, Albany, NY, 12231, or to New York Live Arts, 219 West 19th Street, New NY, 10011)

Donations are fully tax deductible. Donate HERE

Press Contacts:

Festival Founder | Keri Kukral, info@rawsciencefilmfestival.com

For more information, visit the festival website: https://www.rawsciencefilmfestival.com/

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Festival: https://www.rawsciencefilmfestival.com/

Films: https://www.rawsciencefilmfestival.com/award-categories