Celebrating LGTBIQA+ scientists… with cinema

Today, November 18th is the international day of LGTBIQA+ People in STEM. To celebrate it, and to help give visibility to LGTBIQA+ scientists throughout history, the LGTBIQA+ group at the PRBB has selected 7 films and TV soaps with LGTBIQA+ scientists as main characters. We hope you enjoy them!

The Imitation Game

This 2014 American historical drama film, directed by Morten Tyldum and written by Graham Moore, is based on the 1983 biography “Alan Turing: The Enigma”, by Andrew Hodges. The film’s title quotes the name of the game cryptanalyst Alan Turing proposed for answering the question “Can machines think?”, in his 1950 seminal paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”. The film stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing, who decrypted German intelligence messages for the British government during World War.

Ammonite

It is a 2020 romantic drama film written and directed by Francis Lee. The film is inspired by the life of Mary Anning, a British paleontologist played by Kate Winslet, who lives in the 1840s with her ailing mother Molly, who helps Mary run a small shop in Lyme Regis, Dorset. Mary spends the early mornings on the beach at low tide in search of fossils for the shop, with tiny ammonites being her most common find. One day, geologist Roderick Murchison visits Mary’s shop accompanied by his wife, Charlotte. He expresses his admiration for Mary’s work and offers to pay her for a guided trip to the shore where he can learn from Mary about fossil collecting. The film centres on a speculative romantic relationship between Mary and Charlotte, played by Saoirse Ronan. 

Awakenings

At the end of the 1960s, Dr. Malcolm Sayer (a fictional character based on the real Dr. Oliver Sacks), a New York neurologist, decides to use a new drug to treat his patients with encephalitis lethargica, a disease that deprives sufferers of motor faculties until they are reduced to a vegetative state. Some improvement will begin to manifest itself in the patients, especially in Leonard Lowe. Film from 1990 directed by Penny Marshall.

A Beautiful Mind

Inspired by Sylvia Nasar’s 1998 biography of the mathematician John Nash, a Nobel Laureate in Economics. The story begins in Nash’s days as a graduate student at Princeton University. Early in the film, Nash begins to develop paranoid schizophrenia and endures delusional episodes while watching the burden his condition brings on his wife Alicia and friends.

Leonardo

This is a TV soup, with 8 episodes, that explains the story of the great Leonardo da Vinci through his works. The story of how he became an incomparable genius, whose work broke the rules of the established order.

Sally Ride: Life Stories from the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum

Short documentary about the life and historical impact of America’s First Woman in Space and the history of women entering the astronaut corps. On June 18, 1983, Ride became the first U.S. female astronaut in space when she and her four crewmates launched on STS-7.

Rachel Carson

A documentary profile of scientist and writer Rachel L. Carson (1907-64), whose 1962 book “Silent Spring” helped launch the modern environmental movement.