Review: An inspiring profile of science’s next generation

Early in the new documentary Inventing Tomorrow, the camera follows a teenager as she approaches a field of deep green plants in her hometown of Bangalore, India. It seems like a picturesque scene—but the teenager, Sahithi Pingali, quickly sets the viewer straight. The plants, she explains, are growing over the surface of a lake, feeding on the raw sewage being dumped into the water due to insufficient sanitation infrastructure. The dense plant life has killed the animals that used to live in the lake, a process called eutrophication.

Sahithi is not at the lake to lament what’s happened. She’s there to take a sample for pollutant analysis, and she’s been working to enlist other community members to collect and test samples too. She’s profiled in the film because her project, “An Innovative Crowd-Sourcing Approach to Monitoring Fresh Water Bodies,” has earned her a spot at the upcoming Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, or ISEF.

Inventing Tomorrow follows four groups of ISEF finalists whose work focuses on local environmental challenges. For Sahithi and the other students, environmental catastrophe is not a remote future possibility or something that happens in far-off locations. It is a real and immediate threat to their communities.

Despite that alarming backdrop, Inventing Tomorrow is a fundamentally optimistic film about young people using science to find solutions. Director Laura Nix does not send the message that science and technology will solve all of our problems, but the spotlight on engaged, passionate teenagers can’t help but inspire hope.

Nuha Anfaresi and Intan Putri, for example, live on the island of Bangka, Indonesia, where legal and illegal tin mining is a major industry. The mining waste contains lead, which is turning the beautiful ocean waters surrounding their home into a poisonous soup. Their project aims to create a filtration system that could be used to catch the lead and other harmful runoff before it enters the water.

In Monterrey, Mexico, one of the most polluted cities in Latin America, Fernando Sánchez Villalobos, Jesús Martínez Aranda, and Jose Elizade Esparaza have developed a photocatalytic paint that can remove titanium dioxide and sulfur dioxide from the air. Jared Goodwin of Hilo, Hawaii, lives near a pond where local industries used to dump arsenic-contaminated waste. Since then, two tsunamis have dispersed the pond’s water widely. Jared samples local soils to find out where the arsenic contamination has spread.

When we meet our four groups of young scientists, they have already been selected as ISEF finalists through a series of rigorous local competitions. The students are preparing to travel to Los Angeles to display their posters, explain their work to a series of judges, and be considered for one of ISEF’s prestigious prizes.

The scenes shot at ISEF are by turns exhilarating and frustrating. Nix is the first and only filmmaker to obtain permission to film the ISEF judging process, an advantage that sets Inventing Tomorrow apart from this year’s other ISEF documentary, Science Fair. It’s clear that the fair does a great deal to sponsor and encourage talented young people from all over the world, and it’s delightful to watch the students interact with one another. But the playing field is not necessarily equal. The Monterrey team, for example, presents its work in Spanish and uses an interpreter to communicate with the English-speaking judges. ISEF officials assure them that this won’t work against them in the judging, but a sequence in which the interpreter struggles to translate a crucial technical term makes it clear that fluency in English offers a significant advantage.

That said, one of the welcome features of Inventing Tomorrow is the light touch that Nix uses to handle the competition itself. The point of the film is not to showcase who wins top honors, but to illuminate the journeys students have taken just to be at the festival. Sahithi began as an activist worried about pollution in Bangalore and took samples so that she could collect data to back up her concerns. Jared grew up hearing his grandmother tell the story of the tsunami that wiped out her family home and has walked by the contaminated pond nearly every day of his childhood. The three young men from Mexico will be the first in their families to attend college; all three work after-school jobs to help support their parents and younger siblings. Nuha and Intan are the first finalists from Bangka, and their warm friendship creates some of the film’s funniest moments.

Inventing Tomorrow, a film that will inspire and move anyone who cares about science education, opens in select cities on 31 August. It’s a privilege to spend 105 minutes in the company of these young scientists.