The Sundance Film Festival announced today that the U.S.-Mexico film Son of Monarchs directed by French-Venezuelan film director Alexis Gambis is the recipient of the 2021 Alfred P. Sloan Prize, awarded every year to a film at the Sundance Film Festival that focuses on science or technology as a theme, or depicts a scientist, engineer, or mathematician as a major character. The film will be premiering in the Next competition at Sundance, dedicated to “pure, bold works distinguished by an innovative, forward-thinking approach to storytelling.”
Starring Tenoch Huerta, Alexia Rasmussen, Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez, Noé Hernández, Paulina Gaitán, and William Mapother, the film tells the story of Mendel who, enchanted by the monarch butterflies of Michoacán, Mexico, since he was a child, dedicates his career as a scientist in New York to mapping out the monarch’s genetics. But he is haunted by flashbacks of being orphaned alongside his older brother, Simon, when their parents died in a flood.
When Mendel travels home to attend the funeral of his grandmother, it's clear Simon harbors deep resentment toward him for having left. Migrating back and forth between Mexico and New York, Mendel starts to neglect his new girlfriend and grows spiritually restless as he obsesses over the iconic butterfly. Then he confronts his brother about what really happened the night their parents died.
Huerta (Narcos, Güeros) delivers a soul-searing performance in this transformative debut by director Alexis Gambis. The film viscerally captures the scientific marvel and splendor of the butterfly, which in turn creates a mythic parallel to Mendel’s primal fears. Son of Monarchs is at once a spiritual and biological quest of the next generation—fulfilling its destiny by never losing sight of ancestral ties.
Past Latinx and Latin American winners of the Alfred P. Sloan include the Brazilian film The House of Sand by Andrucha Waddington in 2006, Alex Rivera’s The Sleep Dealer in 2008, The Stanford Prison Experiment by Kyle Patrick Alvarez, and the Colombian film Embrace of the Serpent by Ciro Guerra in 2016.
