Alison Rose is a director and writer whose filmmaking explores how people experience and understand the world – scientifically, ethically, and spiritually. Her previous documentaries include Galileo’s Sons and Love at the Twilight Motel. Star Men is her first cross-platform project. Alison’s lifelong interest in astronomy was seeded growing up in rural places with brilliant star-filled skies. At 10 Alison began using binoculars to look at the night sky. But no one told her she could be an astronomer! In Grade 8 she wrote her public speaking address on the kind imagination it takes to conceive of a black hole, using the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the school library as her primary resource. Alison studied political science at Trinity College, the University of Toronto and began a career in journalism, moving from daily news to magazine writing and eventually to documentary filmmaking. Filmmaking led her back to astronomy. Her first documentary, Galileo’s Sons, explored the Vatican Observatory and asked how a religious priest could be a scientist. During the making of the Star Men, Alison got a job at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics for 18 months, learning about the field in its present state and seeing just what an important contribution the four had made. Alison says: “I think a lot about storytelling from an existential point of view. As in, ‘what am I doing? what does it matter?’ I really struggle with that. I’ve come to think over the course of making this film that story telling is essential to human life.”
2016-04-17
