Science on Screen®: THE POD GENERATION – Who owns the future of reproduction?
THE POD GENERATION
by Sophie Barthes
with special guest speaker Elizabeth Reis
Part of the SCIENCE ON SCREEN® Series
An initiative of the Coolidge Corner Theatre in partnership with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
THE POD GENERATION
2023, USA/France, Sci-fi comedy/satire, 110 minutes
Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival
In Sophie Barthes’ witty, unsettling The Pod Generation, a New York couple (Emilia Clarke, Chiwetel Ejiofor) is offered a tantalizing new possibility: instead of pregnancy, they can grow their baby in a detachable artificial womb, or “pod”, provided by a powerful tech company. For Rachel, a rising executive, it promises freedom and convenience. For Alvy, a botanist who believes in the messy, organic rhythms of nature, it represents something much harder to embrace.
Winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize at Sundance, The Pod Generation uses a near-future fantasy to ask questions that are becoming increasingly real: Could artificial wombs transform pregnancy and parenting? Would they liberate us from the physical demands of reproduction, or create new forms of control? And when technology can make reproduction more convenient, who gets to decide what progress looks like?
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Elizabeth Reis is Professor Emerita in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department at the University of Oregon and recently retired from the Macaulay Honors College at CUNY, where she taught classes on medical ethics; gender and bioethics; and reproductive technologies. She is the author of Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex (2009), published in an expanded second edition in 2021; Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England; and the editor of several books, including American Sexual Histories. She is a member of the Ethics Committee at New York Presbyterian Weill Cornell Hospital and an editor of Nursing Clio. You can read more about her work at lizziereis.com.
Tickets:
$7/adult (plus $5 Symphony Space Facility Fee added at checkout)
$5/seniors & students (plus $5 Symphony Space Facility Fee added at checkout)
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the NYC Department of Youth and Community Development (DYCD) in partnership with the City Council and the office of NY City Council Majority Leader Shaun Abreu and Speaker Julie Menin
