See Science Fair even if you have never participated

Scientific documentaries face a real challenge when it comes to drawing an audience that is not yet engaged in the care of science. Finding new ways to say "You really should go see this is not just science" is often a fight.

Science Fair is a rare entry in the category because its human elements are so obvious. Team work, competition, obstacles to overcome and ultimate outcome. Mankind is in the foreground so often that it's easy to forget that the movie is about science. In fact, all the basic human problems almost hide what the film really is: teenagers on the threshold of adulthood struggling in a world that often does not know what to do with them, but they find their people – the spirits similar that they can finally feel at home with.

The film is funny, moving and moving, with a universal theme that is right in science. And it's really, really good.

The science fairs of my youth often included children who had trouble showing exhibits that did something like volcanoes made from baking soda. But the competition at the center of Science Fair– the International Fair of Science and Engineering of Intel – is closer to what I have done as a graduate student. The experiments are far too complex and require far too much replication to make sense in front of an audience. Instead, the data has all been analyzed and placed on a poster, and the experimenters are talking to people through the details.

If the children succeed in regional competitions, they have the right to go to the final. This one – week contest is judged by scientists and attracts competitors from dozens of countries. It's a bit like a science Olympiad, except that in addition to rewarding winners and placers in various disciplines, only one research project is named each year winner.

How do you get a high school kid who is a graduate student? There is no way forward, and that's one of the things that the film clearly shows by following a variety of students in the competition up to a year .

The filmmakers behind Science Fair have chosen their subjects with brio. There is the out-performant of remarkable maturity, two years younger than his classmates, who has just learned his first traces of humility (partly losing in these competitions). There is a Brazilian team from a community that still has dirt roads and whose teachers are crying thinking about the doors that the success of the competition would open. And there is the articulated football ball whose parents look perplexed while he almost misses trigonometry because he is distracted by number theory, which he teaches himself.

Adults also play an active role.

We spend time with the daughter of African immigrants, who holds a doctorate, who serves as a hyper-demanding housewife at a high school that regularly sends half a dozen teams to the final. And a football coach from a high school in South Dakota who ends up mentoring one of the students – not because he understands his research, but simply because he's ready to push it when the science teachers at his school lose interest. (This disinterest is almost at the school level: her classmates do not even know that she exists, despite her success in recent years.)

Almost every one of these characters (and many others that I have not mentioned) is fascinating and could probably be the subject of a short film on its own. But the real impact of the film comes from the image that these characters are used to paint.

It's probably an exaggeration to say that Science Fair humanizes scientists. These children are as obsessive and offbeat as a top athlete. But despite their oddity, students form teams, help each other, get excited about each other's projects, go to parties and form groups when they gather at the same place for the final competition. For many of them, coming from schools that do not know what to do with their brains and their conduct, this is probably the first time they really feel like part of their peers. secondary.

But above all, Science Fair makes it clear that his subjects are human, working on such things as simple tests to detect the presence of arsenic in water, a defense against the Zika virus or a better understanding of at-risk adolescents. And, in doing so, the film explains why science is so important and deserves to be better valued than by people other than those who are obsessed.