Kelydra Welcker is one of three high school scientists profiled in WHIZ KIDS (courtesy Sandbar Pictures)
WHIZ KIDS (Tom Shepard, 2010)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St.
Opens Friday, June 4
212-924-3363
www.whizkidsmovie.com
www.cinemavillage.com
In case you’re worried about the next generation of Americans, WHIZ KIDS shows that there are plenty of intelligent, ambitious teenagers around the country looking to better themselves and, more importantly, the planet. Working with Tina DiFeliciantonio (LIVING WITH AIDS) and Jane C. Wagner, Tom Shepard (SCOUT’S HONOR) spent a year following three high school students as they prepared for the annual Intel Science Talent Search: Long Island botanist Ana Cisneros, West Virginia environmental scientist Kelydra Welcker, and Staten Island paleontologist Harmain Khan. Through school and regional competitions up through the grand finale in Washington, DC, Shepard, himself a 1987 finalist, gets the protagonists to share their hopes and dreams, their fears and failures. As much as each teenager wants to win the prestigious talent search, which was famously previously sponsored by Westinghouse, they also need to win, as the $100,000 prize would help them afford to go to an Ivy League institution. Welcker’s story is particularly fascinating and frustrating, as an important regional science fair, partly sponsored by DuPont, is curiously canceled immediately after news of her project, which involves a new way of cleaning water possibly contaminated by a DuPont Teflon factory, becomes public. One of the most exciting parts of the documentary, which has nothing to do with Kelydra, Ana, and Harmain, depicts the wild and woolly final minutes leading up to the Intel application deadline, when procrastinating students must get their papers in no later than 11:59, no exceptions of any kind allowed. Treading carefully to avoid becoming yet another reality-show movie, WHIZ KIDS winds up being a rather smart, enlightening film that opens, appropriately enough, while the World Science Festival is in New York.