“Avoid Time Blur”: at CPH:DOX, the Red Heaven Filmmakers on Surviving Isolation

Keeping calm and carrying on (digitally, that is) during the global pandemic, CPH:DOX fittingly launched its five-day CPH:CONFERENCE series with a program titled “Science is Culture.” The “day celebrating the value of science in society and exploring how new approaches to science storytelling can engage the audience” was moderated by Jessica Harrop, supervising producer of science-centric doc studio Sandbox Films. (And impressively so. Not only did Harrop seem to be downloading questions directly from my head, but she kept the proceedings running swiftly and smoothly, all while sheltering in place from her Brooklyn apartment no less.)

While every discussion was filled with insightful dos and and often surprising don’ts (I’m talking to you, Neil deGrasse Tyson — or at least keynote speaker and University of Wisconsin prof Dietram Scheufele was) when it came to best practices in getting scientific points to stick, the final session of the day proved unnervingly timely in light of the COVID-19 circumstances. Lauren DeFilippo and Katherine Gorringe, co-directors of Red Heaven, which screened CPH:DOX and had been slated to world premiere at SXSW, joined Harrop online to discuss their doc feature, which follows six scientists on NASA’s simulated Mars mission in Hawaii. It was a scientific experiment that also turned out to be a social one, as the sextet was pretty much confined to a 1,200-square-foot dome for an entire year. (A good reminder that we self-isolators here on earth can indeed survive in shoebox apartments for a month or more.)

To read all about it visit Filmmaker magazine.