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.

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

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.

Premiere films 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.