Today at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, the nonprofit Sundance Institute and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s joint Science-In-Film Initiative honored Love Me, from filmmaker duo Sam and Andy Zuchero, with this year’s juried Feature Film Prize.

Also announced today were the recipients of three artist grants aimed at supporting projects currently in development: Emily Everhard received the Sloan Episodic Fellowship for Tektite, Sara Crow and Daniel Rafailedes received the Sloan Development Fellowship for Satoshi, and Lizzi Oyebode received the Sloan Commissioning Grant for Inverses.

The filmmakers received a total of $84,000 in cash awards and were celebrated today at a reception hosted by the Foundation in Park City. Prior to the reception, the Feature Film Prize winners participated in a Sloan Foundation–sponsored Beyond Film event, The Big Conversation: Screen of Consciousness, where they discussed cinema’s portrayal of artificial intelligence.

“The connection between art and science, while indelible, is also ever-changing. Each year, thanks to our long-standing partnership with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, we are able to imagine with greater nuance how science can bolster art, and vice versa,” said Sundance Institute CEO Joana Vicente. “Through the Science-In-Film Initiative’s Feature Film Prize and the artist grants, we are honored to recognize the artists pioneering how this relationship is explored and uplifted in media. We are thrilled to celebrate this year’s recipients and to have created a space to further discourse on this compelling topic at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.”

“We are delighted to honor Sam and Andy Zuchero’s Love Me, an original and wildly imaginative film about the nature of human identity and our connection to each other in a post-human world mediated through artificial intelligence,” said Doron Weber, Vice President and Program Director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “In a year when Chris Nolan’s great-man-of-science biopic, Oppenheimer, based on the Sloan book American Prometheus, broke box office records and garnered acclaim, we are especially pleased to award three screenwriting fellowships to four outstanding writers who dramatize the unique obstacles and underappreciated contributions of exceptional women in science and technology. This year’s winners are wonderful additions to the nationwide Sloan film program and further proof of the vitality of our pioneering, two-decade partnership with Sundance.”