Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s The Stanford Prison Experiment won the $20,000 Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize today as the Sundance Instituteunveiled its Science-in-Film Prizes in Park City. The film is based on the infamous 1971 psychological exercise in which college students exhibited shockingly cruel and sadistic behavior when divided into camps of prisoners and prison guards.
Archive writer-director Jonathan Minard and writer Scott Rashap picked up the Sundance Institute/Sloan Fellowship, and Jon Noble (Tyfus) and Cutter Hodierne & John Hibey (Otzi) received the Sundance Institute/Sloan Commissioning Grants, presented through Sundance Institute’s Feature Film Program. Archive follows two lovers who face the intangibility and distance that characterized their relationship — a virtual affair lived entirely through email and chat. In Tyfus, two Polish doctors try to protect their town from the Nazis by secretly engineering a fake outbreak of typhus. Otzi sees two hikers discover a perfectly mummified corpse high in the Italian Alps, revealing a 5,300-year-old murder mystery that becomes a legend around the world.
Alvarez takes home a $20,000 prize, and the grantees pick up $12,500 apiece.