In conjunction with BAMPFA’s presentation of Son of Monarchs, watch a conversation with writer/director Alexis Gambis and biologist Aaron Pomerantz, moderated by Andrés Cediel.

Alexis Gambis is a French Venezuelan filmmaker, molecular biologist, and assistant professor in the Departments of Sciences and Arts & Humanities at New York University Abu Dhabi. His feature films include The Color of Time (2012), The Fly Room (2014), and Mosaic (2017). He is a 2019 TED fellow and he is the founder and artistic director of the Imagine Film Festival, dedicated to exploring the intersection of art and science.

Aaron Pomerantz is a doctoral student in integrative biology at UC Berkeley interested in how butterflies are able to produce such an incredible array of colors through the use of pigments and structural coloration. He spent two years as a field biologist at the Tambopata Research Center, a remote research outpost in the Peruvian Amazon, and has received grant funding from the National Geographic Society to apply novel technology to fieldwork, such as origami-based microscopes and handheld gene sequencers.

Andrés Cediel is a documentary filmmaker and Professor of Visual Journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He produced “Rape in the Fields” and was a writer and producer of “Rape on the Night Shift” which combined to win a duPont-Columbia Journalism Award, the RFK Grand Prize for Journalism, and were nominated for four national Emmys. He was a writer and producer of “Trafficked in America,” and he co-produced “The Judge and the General,” a dupont-Columbia Journalism winner and Emmy nominated film which chronicled human rights cases against former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.